The Log House on Prince Edward Island
Prologue – Memories of Student Days
This Bartlett print caught my attention when I was a student, and I set out to obtain a copy for my collection of pictures. The mystery of the deep forest with its crude log house assembled to supply shelter for British colonists caught my imagination, and I fantasied about their struggle.
“A first Settlement,” from Canadian Scenery, Illustrated from drawings by William. H. Bartlett, engraved by J. C. Bentley, with text by Nathaniel Parker Willis, in 2 volumes, with a total of 117 steel plate engravings. London, Virtue & Co., City Road and Ivy Lane, 1842.
While I was hunting for this Bartlett print, I was at university immersed in the study of Classical Civilization. We were reading the history written by the Ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 84 – c. 25 BC) to learn about the Persian invasion of Greece with its great battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae. I was more seduced by Herodotus’ attempt to tell the story of the Scythians, nomadic horsemen of Iranian origin who, from the Seventh to the Third Centuries BC, ranged unstoppable across the Steppes of Central Asia in search of space and treasure. Their possessions were small, portable, and precious, consisting mostly of gold ornaments for their beloved horses and some glitter to set off their brightly-coloured clothing.
Photo: Mounted Scyth, repoussé gold, 5.2 cm high, from Kul Oba, near Kerch, Eastern Crimea. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
I became deeply interested in these people and read everything I could lay my hands on. With my mind still wandering the North American forests in the footsteps of Bartlett’s log house settlers, I was shocked to discover that all those centuries ago – nearly three millennia – the Scythians too built log houses exactly as our ancestors did and they survived only because they were underground tomb structures, creating a home for eternity under a huge clay mound. Robbers dug down from the top to steal the gold, and the Siberian climate filled the chambers with water which promptly froze until they were excavated. Here is what such a log burial house looks like, preserved by the permafrost.
Photo: Log tomb structure, from burial mound 5 at Pazyryk, in the Altai Mountains, Siberia. Length 600 cm. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Simpson p. 262.
Every summer, in those days of the mid-1960s, I returned to my hometown of Tignish to work on a multi-year experiment to see if it was possible to bring stories of the marvels of the world – in all their forms – to a village that by nature was a very closed community. During my explorations I came across a log house near the shore at Anglo Tignish Beach. Using Meacham’s 1880 ATLAS I tried to find out on whose property it stood in the Nineteenth Century but could not come to any conclusion. It might have been Acadian but it was surrounded mostly by property owners with Anglo names.
There, still in reasonable condition, was this finely built house of squared logs, tightly joined, with dovetailed corners. There was still evidence that at least a partial floored loft had been built to accommodate the expanding family. In its almost windowless way, it was a sophisticated house. There was still evidence on it that the exterior was cladded with a base of birch bark covered with shingles. At a later date, probably to make it habitable in more recent times, it was covered with asphalt siding.
This was the beginning of my interest in the log house on Prince Edward Island.
The French Log House
The French settlers in New France, Acadia and Ile Saint Jean brought with them the vision of an ideal house, which could be constructed of stone or have a mortice and tenon frame that could be clad with a variety of materials, depending upon the locality in France from which these settlers came. The great rush to provide shelter before the killing frosts of winter arrived caused many of them – we don’t know the number – to build in a style that had been known at home for centuries: arranging solid timbers in vertical or horizontal fashion, with greater or lesser degree of finishing, and sealed from the cold drafts by woodland moss or sea weed or a mixture of mud and straw or dead plants.
As I discussed in my previous post on Domestic Architecture on Ile Saint Jean, it appears that the favoured method of construction was pounding tall posts into the ground in palisade fashion, something that had been done at least since Roman times.
FRENCH AND ACADIAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE: PART II – ILE SAINT JEAN
January 31, 2022
It is incredible to think that when Samuel Holland surveyed the Island in 1765 to turn it into a feudal colonial territory, he found more than 400 Acadian structures still standing. He marked them all on this great manuscript map as red dots.
This detail of the map, showing the settlement and harbour of Saint Pierre shows the grouped concentrations along the shore that we have come to associate with French/Acadian communities.
Samuel Holland’s Manuscript Map of Saint John’s Island, Kew Archives
These red dots translate easily into this detail of a view of the village of Beausejour just before it was destroyed in 1755. The riverine scatter is the same, as are the houses themselves.
Detail from: Unsigned [probably by John Hamilton], View of the French Fort at Beau=sejour: 1755, pen and black ink with monochrome and pink wash, sheet 33.7 x 53.5 cm, George III Collection, British Library. 1755.
This graphic, from a previous post, illustrates the three principal styles of building most commonly used in Acadia – the en picquet or palisade style, horizontal log or pièce sur pièce, and mortise and tenon frame – en colombage – with various fillings.
Illustration: Jefferys, Charles W. 1942
Building Types in New England
The log house, exactly as we know it in North America, has a very ancient history where the custom of building in that style eventually made it way to Western Europe – as everything eventually does – and, in some countries, was a very old way of building. The story of the log house in colonial America, in its several styles, is a complicated one, and has been the subject of much controversy, especially among the Americans.
There is a considerable amount of literature produced by Americans that delves into the origin, nature, terminology and distribution of the log cabin, as they call it, in the New England states starting at the end of the Sixteenth Century. Much of it is confusing and this uncertainty is increased because of a war of words as to when and where the log cabin appeared and by whom it was introduced. Considering the ethnic variety of early settlers to New England, when we look at this map, we can see that there were considerable possibilities and varieties of log houses introduced over the centuries, especially the Nineteenth Century with its great surge of inland settlement.
https://frankensaurus.com/log_building
In Shurtleff’s book, The Log Cabin Myth, the author spends his energy showing again and again that in the Seventeenth Century the log house, or cabin, was practically unknown except for several specific mentions in a few references. He makes a powerful argument that the settlers were not familiar with the log house except as a temporary structure for shelter and storage, seeing only the frame house recalled from home as the most desirable, and easy to construct habitation in the New World. Shurtleff also makes the point, several times, that our knowledge of early colonial architecture is hampered because houses – homes – were not worthy of being written about when there were more vital topics, such as religion and local politics to be reported upon.
Shurtleff is energetically challenged by C. A. Weslager in his book The Log Cabin in America. In his Chapter 3, “Log Houses in Europe,” he spends considerable time going beyond Shurtleff’s time span of the Seventeenth Century and quotes visitor after visitor from Europe who described, in the following Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, town after town built entirely of log houses. For some reason a transition in desirability of style had occurred where settlers, perhaps influenced by Scandinavians and Germans, turned to the log house as the best alternative for their homes in the New World. Weslager then goes on in the following chapters to provide his revision of Shurtleff’s narrative.
What does all this matter to us in New France and the British colony that replaced it? Well, after the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755-58, the new colonists from Great Britain favoured both frame and horizontal log construction, and evidence of both building styles survive to this day. What I believe has not been done in British North America is the preparation of an inventory, based on literary accounts and the study of structures still on the ground, that would give us an idea of the proportion of frame houses to log ones, and the geographical areas in which concentrations of one or the other were manifested.
A Note on Definitions and the Colonist’s Tool chest
I believe it is important at this time to pause and look at the kinds of absolutely vital tools the early settlers from all of Europe brought with them when they emigrated. In Shurtleff’s book, The Log Cabin Myth, the author devotes all of Chapter II to “Definitions and Dialectic” where he very carefully isolates all the terms associated with simple building in wood. Using period dictionaries and written works, he isolates every name associated with building with logs, concentrating on the Seventeenth Century when British settlers first colonized New England. This is a most important piece to read because the author illustrates that the entire historical vocabulary of building with wood is full of subtleties that causes most writers to commit gross errors of description and identification. He is very careful to point out that Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century architectural terms, although identical, may refer to something completely different.
Also in this chapter, he talks about the tools needed by carpenters of the time – tools that will not change until the Twentieth Century – and supplies a list obtained from a book on settlement published in 1626. It is valuable knowledge, so I present the list to you, omitting the cost of each item.
“Note of provisions necessarie for every Planter or personal Adventurer to Virginia,” from Purchas, Samuel, (1577? -1626), Purchas his pilgrimes. part 1 In fiue books …, London: Printed by William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, and are to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Rose, 1625.
Tooles for a Family of sixe persons …
Five broad howes [hoes]
Five narrow howes
Two broad Axes
Five felling Axes
Two Steele Hand-sawes
Two two-hand-sawes
One whip-saw, set and filed with boxe, file and wrest [saw with a narrow blade and a handle at both ends]
Two Hammers
Two Augers
Six Chissels
Two percers stocked [metal punches]
Three gimblets [handtool for drilling]
Two hatchets
Two froves to cleave pale [frow – wide tapered blade to be struck with a maul to make shingles, etc.]
Two hand-bils
One Grindlestone [grindstone]
Nailes of all sorts
The Transition from the French Regime to British Colonial Times
We are most fortunate to have and to treasure a log house that was built in the transitional period between the Deportation of 1758 and the coming of the new British settlers to create a paradise of feudal rusticity on the Island of Saint John. Hidden for nearly two hundred years in the guise of a British Colonial Georgian central plan house in the pastoral landscape of Cymbria, near Rustico, was the Doucet house.
Photo: Farmers’ Bank Museum
According to dendrochronological evidence the core house was built of logs, perhaps around 1772, by Jean Doucet. He had escaped the Deportation and come back to resettle near Rustico where he was evidently tolerated by his English overlords. At that time, for several generations to come, Rustico would be the unofficial centre of the Roman Catholic Church on the Island. Priests who would settle there, in an atmosphere full of contempt for Papists, were not to be found easily and, in their absence, Jean Doucet was given the authority to conduct marriages. Lacking a priest, and to allow approved unions to multiply the People of God, it could be performed by a lay person with the eventual blessing of the Church. As well, the Church teaches that all infants are born with Original Sin, invented by Adam and Eve, and should they die, unless baptised, will be sent to a place on the Edge of Hell called Limbo. Jean Doucet would also have been allowed to administer the Sacrament of Baptism to forestall such eventualities.
There is also a strong tradition in Rustico, no doubt true, that when a priest did visit the area, in lieu of a still un-built church, Mass could be said in a private house. The Doucet house was a Mass House, and when I visited it in the 1980s the rectangular narrow table used from time to time as an altar, was pointed out to me.
So that may be why this particular house was revered and survived into our day. It is vital to understand the close relationship of the Acadians with their Church.
Photo: Carter Jeffery
https://peiheritagebuildings.blogspot.com/2011/01/doucet-house-of-grand-pere-point.html?m=0 et seq
The house stayed in the Doucet family until 1982 when it became available to the Acadian community by gift. The Friends of the Farmers’ Bank moved the house to its present location near the Farmers’ Bank, most appropriately up the slope from the Winter River in 1999. In 2003, with guidance from Parks Canada, Carter Jeffery supervised the transformation of the Doucet house from the Georgian center chimney structure it had become, to an Acadian log house. Here is a close-up of the splendid dovetailing found on the house.
Photo courtesy Carter Jeffery
In season the Doucet house is a very pleasant place to visit, and you can, with fair certainty, believe that you are standing enclosed by the oldest walls on the Island. The ambience is convincing, and, for a moment, you can step back to the time when an Acadian survivor aided the Catholic Church in its mission while farming the productive land of Cymbria.
The Nineteenth Century Romantic Craze for the Log House
I began this post with Bartlett’s little engraving of a Canadian log house, a picture of pioneer days to contemplate in the comfort of your home. As I discussed in a previous post, the great period of expansion into the heartland of British North America took place during what we call the Romantic period, when all the arts departed from the rational organization of the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment and flew wildly into a world of new forms, sounds, colours and compositions involving all the arts.
http://SETTLEMENT IN THE FOREST PRIMEVAL
November 30, 2021
In the United States, in the middle of the Nineteenth Century there grew a number of landscape painting schools that celebrated the grandeur of America and its place as the crowning point of the evolution of world civilization. The most famous was the Hudson River School that produced vast canvases of the local landscape as well as imaginary views of the rise of Civilisation. One of these artists was Asher B. Durand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asher_Brown_Durand
In 1853, as the crowning element of a series of paintings he produced Progress, a vast canvas, full of narrative, some of it painful. On the headland on the left, amidst ruined forests, are the remnants of the Indigenous people who had thrived there for millennia. In the distance is a glittering modern city with its huge buildings and smokestacks. The story moves from left to right.
Asher B. Durand, Progress, from The Advance of Civilisation, 1853, 4 x 6 feet, oil on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
In the right foreground, the symbol of progress and expansion, is a log cabin, surrounded by intense agricultural activity. The wilderness is tamed, and Progress has taken over. But wait! Durand ruins the pastorality of his rural heaven by stringing telegraph poles diagonally into the bright future. A year before this picture was painted the English engineer Frederick N. Gisborne laid an underwater telegraph cable between Carleton Head, Prince Edward Island and Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick! Exactly the same symbol of progress, with its attendant changes in topography, was taking place in both PEI and the Hudson River Valley where an identical cable had just been laid.
So, when we look at the joyful detail, and smell the sweet smell of freshly turned earth, the wildflowers, and the cows with swollen udders going home to be milked, and rejoice in the happy countryside crowned by the settlers’ log cabin, we are also looking straight into the face of its own destruction through accelerated progress. We live today in that ravished landscape with its ravaged topography.
Other Romantic Outbursts
In 1849, the son of a log cabin settler in New York State, Orsamus Turner, wrote four little essays, each illustrated with an exquisite woodcut, chronicling the challenges of setting up a farm in the wilderness. I have reproduced al four essays in another post, but present, once again, the first one, describing and illustrating the first contact with the North American Wilderness. The theme and spirit are the same as the slightly later Durand painting.
Turner, Orsamus, “The Pioneer Settler upon the Holland Purchase, and His Progress,” inserted in Pioneer History of the Holland Purchase of Western New York, embracing some Account of the Ancient Remains … and a History of Pioneer Settlement under the auspices of the Holland Company … etc. etc., (pp. 562-567), Geo H. Derby and Co., Buffalo, 1849.
The engraved view, No. 1, introduces the pioneer. It is Winter. He has, the fall preceding, obtained his “article,” or had his land “booked” to him, and built a rude log house; cold weather came upon him before its completion, and froze the ground, so that he could not mix the straw mortar for his stick chimney, and that is dispensed with. He has taken possession of his new home. The oxen that are browsing, with the cow and three sheep; the two pigs and three fowls that his young wife is feeding from her folded apron; these, with a bed, two chairs, a pot and kettle, and a few other indispensable articles for house keeping, few and scanty altogether, as may be supposed, for all were brought in upon that ox sled, through an underbrushed woods road; these constitute the bulk of his worldly wealth. The opening in the woods is that only, which has been made to get logs for his house, and browse his cattle for the few days he has been the occupant of his new home. He has a rousing fire; logs are piled up against his rude chimney back; his fire wood is convenient and plenty, as will be observed. There is a little hay piled on a hovel off to the right; the cattle and the sheep well understand that to be a luxury, only to be dealt out to them occasionally. The roof of his house is of peeled elm bark; his scanty window is of oiled paper; glass is a luxury that has not reached the settlement of which he forms a part. The floor of his house is of the halves of split logs; the door is made of three hewed plank – no boards to be had – a saw mill has been talked of in the neighborhood, but it has not been put in operation. Miles and miles off, through the dense forest, is his nearest neighbor. Those trees are to be felled and cleared away, fences are to be made; here, in this rugged spot, he is to carve out his fortunes, and against what odds! The land is not only to be cleared, but it has to be paid for; all the privations of a wilderness home are to be encountered. The task before him is a formidable one, but he has a strong arm and a stout heart, and the reader has only to look at him as he stands in the foreground, to be convinced that he will conquer all obstacles; that rugged spot will yet “blossom like a rose;” he will yet sit down there with his companion in long years of toil and endurance – age will have come upon them, but success and competence will have crowned their efforts. They are destined to be the founders of a settlement and of a family; to look out upon broad smiling fields where now is the dense forest, and congratulate themselves that they have been helpers in a work of progress and improvement, such as has few parallels, in an age and in a country distinguished for enterprise and perseverance.
Log house settlement on Prince Edward Island
The British colony of Saint John’s Island, renamed Prince Edward Island in 1799, optimistically set out to become the most perfect example of feudal colonization in British North America because of the extraordinary survey of Samuel Holland in 1765 that divided the Island into 67 townships, most with contact with the water. This was because almost no roads were constructed during the French Regime. The Island was set up for settlement with the ruthlessness of the Ancient Romans, whose surveying instructions for new colonies had survived in a book by the architect Vitruvius, who had lived at the time of Christ. A geometric grid was carefully overlaid over every square inch of the colony and settlement was to take place on farms carved from each township, and each one aligned to the magnetic north of 1764. Miraculously, with almost insuperable difficulties caused by the primitive surveying instruments of the day, in time, this was achieved. Three County Capitals – Charlottetown, Princetown and Georgetown were mapped and set up and so the island was ready not only for incursions into the inland wilderness, which had been known only to the indigenous Mi’kmaq. Also, in this wilderness were to be perfect geometric towns, with central squares and measured blocks and streets named after the British Great and Good of the day who had to be flattered.
One wonders what the first settlers on the Island did to provide themselves with a home. There are various accounts one can consult, and some appear later in this post, but perhaps the most succinct was provided by James Pollard in his Historical Sketch. There is an immediacy and hardness about it that sets the tone for the first struggle with the forest.
Emigrants on their arrival here settled upon lease-holdings in the midst of the woods. A site having been selected whereon to put up a hut; the settler proceeded axe in hand to cut down and junk up into equal lengths a number of logs sufficient to raise four walls to the height of some six feet, the ends of these were then dovetailed, which being thus prepared, the four walls were then raised log upon log, then the rough framework of a gabled roof was erected. Light poles were attached to this, and these were covered with a thatch of birch-bark. At one end of the structure a wide fire-place of sandstone or mud was placed, and this was surmounted by an ample chimney, composed of mud and sticks. The chinks between the logs having been filled with moss, the hut was considered ready for habitation during the summer season. By degrees floor and loft were added. Then the clearing of a patch of ground for the raising of potatoes, wheat or oats; while the intrusion of the black bear, wild cat, or the fox, were the only animals to be guarded against, – of which the forest abounded.
Pollard, pp. 39-40
One imagines that the same procedure was followed by those who established themselves in the county capitals, except perhaps, having to go a bit farther afield for their materials. How did Benjamin Chappell fare when he arrived in the wilderness that was the Capital in 1778?
Benjamin Chappell’s log house, circa 1778.
Benjamin Chappell (1740/41 – 1825 was born in London and became a devout Methodist, working for a while as a missionary with the Wesley brothers. He became a skilled worker, in those days called a mechanic, with special abilities as a wheelwright and machinist. At that time the word “machinist” meant a person who could make and fix any part of the new machines that ran the Industrial Revolution. He was skilled at building water mills that were the source of power for many of these new machines.
In the summer of 1774. Chappell and his new wife Elizabeth set sail for New London in what was then called Grenville Bay to serve a period of indenture as an apprentice in the employ of the founder of the settlement. While there, he became very active as a Methodist preacher and had a large following. When the period of indenture ended, and indications were that there was little future for New London, Chappell and his wife moved to the capital city of Charlottetown in October of 1778 where his many skills would be in the highest demand. He became very successful in his craft and had a long successful life.
Charlottetown had been newly laid out as an ideal city with a large central square flanked by four public parks. It had broad streets named after King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte and the various aristocrats who were employed in the colonisation process, or who were owned favours and honours. When Chappell arrived there the city plan had only been put in final form for about seven years and the grid existed only in theory. Wilderness and stumps were everywhere. Chappell found a waterfront lot, where there had been considerable clearing, at the east end of Water Street where it borders Prince Street, and there built a log house. Some years later, in 1812 he built a small postoffice at the back of his lot to deal with the increasing volume of mail. With an interruption, Chappell had been Post Master from 1802-1825.
Detail of Wright, George, PLAN/ of/ CHARLOTTE TOWN/ Showing the true position of the Streets/ and the encroachments thereon/ Surveyed by Order of His Excellence/ Lieutenant Governor Young, 1833. PARO.
In the PEI Museum Collection there is a sketch of Chappell’s house by the English artist John Newbery, born in 1808 and who died in Charlottetown in 1875. At present nothing more is known about him (Porter 1987). Evidence in the drawing gives it a credible date. Newbery has the 1812 Post Office peeking out behind the house, and in the distance can be seen the spire of Saint Paul’s Church in Queen’s Square constructed in 1836. An early drawing by Mary Hebbes, known only from a small halftone print in the January 8, 1947 edition of the Guardian, shows the church tower with pinnacles, which it is safe to assume were removed in the major renovations of 1845-46, as they are absent in the enlarged church. She lived in Charlottetown from 1841-48 and is remembered in art as having produced sketches of Saint Paul’s and Government House, long disappeared into private collections and known only from the halftones in the 1947 edition of the Guardian. The English artist George Hubbard and his wife were employed to teach in the Infant School, south of the church, which Isaac Smith had designed in 1843. Hubbard’s large watercolour of Queen’s Square, done shortly after that time, shows the pinnacles on the church tower. So, using evidence from the three pictures it is possible to assign a date of 1841-46 to Newbery’s drawing.
The John Newbery drawing is labelled “General Post Office Prince Edward Island from 1766 to 1836.” Charlottetown was not laid out as a city until 1768 and had no postmaster until 1800, relying on local merchants to receive and distribute the little mail there was. Chappell was acting postmaster from 1802 – 1825 when his son Robert took over the job. This inscription on the drawing may be original, the artist being from England, might have been misinformed when he added that label, or it might have been added by someone at a later date to give importance to the drawing. That sort of thing happens from time to time.
In spite of the thin information we have about the artist, the sketch most probably predates 1846, and interior evidence suggests it was drawn on the spot when the house was beginning to fall apart. Benjamin Bremner, in An Island Scrapbook (1932) quotes the P. E. Island Times, in an article of 1836, that said:—”We cannot refrain from offering a remark on the appearance of our Post Office. Undoubtedly, Charlottetown deserves a more respectable building for that purpose, and ought to be ashamed of the present.” To which I would say “Do not destroy it, but let the Government preserve it intact, as a souvenir of the past.” Imagine somebody speaking out for heritage preservation in Charlottetown as early as 1932!
John Newbery ( 1808-1875), General Post Office Prince Edward Island 1766 to 1836, Ink and wash on paper. Prince Edward Island Museum. No date, but pre-1846.
This winter view – most likely meant as an affectionate caricature of what remained in the mid-1840s – shows a central plan structure built with horizontal logs with at least one of the dovetailed corners protected by boards usually placed to slow the process of rot in the joints. There is seasonal winter porch around the door to be taken down during the warm weather. Chappell, an obsessive record keeper, kept detailed notes in his daybook about when the porch was put up and taken down again – November 28 1797 and March 31, 1798 (Sobey, personal communication). The house has a loft illuminated by two shed dormers, and on the roof is a ladder to service the chimneys at each end of the house.
On the roof is mounted a huge weathervane that was the talk of the town in its day. Bremner (p. 50) in his caption below the line cut reproduction of this drawing says, “The above rather quaint drawing of the original post office is a fair representation of the old building, still on Water Street, except the look-outs on the roof. The weather-vane also is gone, but was once a reality, but as shown in the picture is truly a remarkable creation of the artist’s imagination, being nearly as long as the roof itself.” He goes on to say, quoting a boy in a conversation about the old post office, — “I recollect old Mr. Chappell who kept the post office. He had a board the shape of a fish on his house over where he slept, and at the end of the board was another which turned round and indicated the way the wind was, and by this he could tell when the wind was fair for the Packet.” This confusing description probably means that above a fixed crosspiece indicating the points of the compass was a large, probably tooled copper, fish on a pivot that was moved around by the wind. The fish, incidentally, is a very ancient subject for a weather vane, going back at least to the Tower of the Winds in Athens (100-50 BC). In having a fish weathervane Chappell was only following a popular tradition. Being such a devout man and an active missionary, he may also have been thinking of Matthew 4:19 where Jesus said to his disciples, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.
We have a last witness account of the post office by Bremner as late as 1932. He says (p. 51), “The First Post Office building in Charlottetown, built in 1780, and which served for the whole Island, is still to be seen in almost its original form … on Water Street, north side, and about opposite the lawn of the present “Lenox” Hotel.”
It is significant that Benjamin Chappell, with all his skills, chose to construct a log house and not one with a braced frame. This suggests that in those early years of the city many of the houses were built with logs, and for a man in a hurry to settle down, this was the easiest path to take.
The Wellington Hotel
The next log house in Charlottetown that I want to discuss is the Wellington Hotel, now part of the Murphy Great George Hotel complex occupying 17 historic buildings in the heritage heart of old Charlottetown. The first mention of a house on this site is in a newspaper account from 1811 describing how a partially constructed house on that spot was blown down in October of that year when several buildings in the first stages of construction were “dashed to the ground in the most shattered condition,” (Rogers 1974,’76, pp. 124-125). One of these belonged to John Cobley Welsford and it was located opposite one of the most socially eminent properties in the town, that of General Edmund Fanning who had been the Island’s second Governor from 1786-1805. It was he who set aside nearly 100 acres of land, next to the city, where a proper house for the governor could be built and an estate farm established. Today, what is left of it is known as Fanningbank. The rest became Victoria Park in the 1870s.
Detail of Wright, George, PLAN/ of/ CHARLOTTE TOWN/ Showing the true position of the Streets/ and the encroachments thereon/ Surveyed by Order of His Excellence/ Lieutenant Governor Young, 1833. PARO.
It was all too much for Mr. Welsford and in August 1812 he sold the property to John Howell who may or may not have built on the site, but by March 28, 1818, Howell published in the Prince Edward Island Gazette that he had been granted a license to “keep Houses of Entertainment and retail spiritous liquors” at the Wellington Hotel. The Fannings must have been appalled.
The Hotel, a hipped roofed central plan five bay structure must have been a welcome addition to the sparsely populated city. In no time it became famous as the best hotel and drinking place in town and there were even public entertainments involving acrobats and Arabian horses given in the back lot. The lovely Colonial Revival corner store front must have been added in the early 1900s.
But how was this house constructed? I had the privilege, when the Murphy Group was renovating, one by one, all the buildings on Great George Street on the block opposite the Basilica, to examine the gutted interior of the Wellington Hotel. To my immense surprise I discovered that it was a log house, constructed in the manner using upright logs mortised into a braced frame that the French called en colombage. This diagram shows a variety of how the logs were arranged. They could be spaced, as seen here, or placed as close together as possible as seen in the photo below.
Diagram from Moogk p 25
Stripped of its laths and plaster here is the wall of the hotel facing Sydney Street. As you can see the construction technique clearly involved mortising the vertical logs into the braced frame during the process of construction.
I have a vestigial memory that will not go away of reading in a hopefully temporarily forgotten source that, lacking skilled carpenters in the city, Acadians were imported from New Brunswick to come and build this and other buildings at that time. The possibility of the Wellington Hotel being an Acadian structure built en colombage is a most attractive possibility to contemplate.
There is another thing which should cause us pause at this time because the great English architect of the Picturesque movement, John Plaw, had just settled in Charlottetown and had designed an extremely elegant courthouse in 1811 whose architectural details were to influence domestic architecture for years to come in the work of his successor, a Yorkshireman named Isaac Smith, who came to Charlottetown in 1817, three years before Plaw’s death. They built exclusively in the braced frame technique that I will discuss in another post.
Plaw’s Courthouse with Town Crier, photographed by Lt. Trotter RN, August 15, 1862. Gillingwater Collection.
Accounts of Travellers
There are a number of written accounts by travellers who visited the Island in the following years who wrote careful descriptions of what they saw here. One of them, Walter Johnstone, who wrote his books in the form of letters to the folks at home wrote this very interesting account of his impression of both log and frame houses being built on the Island during the time of his visit in 1822. He describes log houses and from his words he might have seen houses en colombage, like the Wellington Hotel as well as the more ordinary frame house finished with plaster and lath or beaded boards on the interior and shingles or clapboards on the outside. He is particularly aware that, having no limestone with which to make lime, islanders had to use mud as a mortar for the fireplaces of their chimneys but would use planks insulated with mud for the upper parts that protruded through the roof.
From: Johnstone, Walter. A Series of Letters, Descriptive of Prince Edward Island, in the Gulph of St. Lawrence. Dumfries: Printed for the Author, by J. Swan. 1822
… Their houses are all constructed of wood, some of squared, and others unsquared logs, laid horizontally, and dove-tailed at the corners. Others have the wood set perpendicularly, and fixed to beams above and below, previously framed together, the whole size of the building. This is called a frame-house: some are thatched with birch bark, others with boards; and the old settlers generally have them shingled. This is pine split thin, and dressed with a drawing knife like slate, and nailed on in the same manner. This covering, when painted, will last long, and looks exceedingly handsome. They cover the walls on the outside, when properly finished, with dressed boards nailed on horizontally, overlapping one another to keep out the wind and rain; and when they are well done up in this manner, shingled and painted, they appear both shewy and handsome. Some of them are lathed and plastered inside; but as lime is not easily got, the greater part that are finished within are lined with dressed boards both on the walls and cieling [sic]. Their floors are all of boards, with large cellars below, to keep their potatoes in safety from the frost during winter. To these cellars they descend by a trap door in the middle of the floor. Their chimneys are built of stone below, and adapted for burning wood; but the upper part is often finished with wood, and clay mixed with straw, or what is known in Scotland by the name of cat and clay. But they are now getting brick prepared up on the Island, which in all probability will soon be used as a substitute for wood and clay.
Log house from the recreated Selkirk Settlement at Belfast. Photo R. Porter 1981.
These houses are uncommonly hot in summer, and cold in winter, and soon begin to rot at the ground, if not underfooted with brick or stone. Observing this I told the Islanders mud walls would be more comfortable in all seasons; that they would last longer, and be less expense in the building, were they once acquainted with the mode of using the excellent clay they possess. As they have no proper paving stones, not only their barns but their stables and byres are all laid with wood, and sometimes a part is laid with planks before the hall door; but many of their houses are done up in the rudest manner possible — the logs being neither covered with dressed boards inside nor out, and the spaces between them only filled up with moss or fog. This at the best admits a great deal of wind whenever it blows hard, and must make them dismal habitations in winter.
House from the former Selkirk Settlement at Belfast turned into a barn. R. Porter photo, 1981.
In 1823 John M’Gregor who produced books about British America that were popular enough to go into a second edition, wrote a very fine, concise description of how log houses were constructed. His information about constructing an entire fireplace and chimney with mud fireproofing is most interesting. Mud – that is, brick clay – which was in fair supply on the Island in these early years before the brick-making industry developed, was used for many things.
From: M’Gregor, John. British America. Volume II, Second Edition. William Blackwood, Edinburgh; and T Cadell, Strand London. 1823, Pp 558-559.
The habitations which the new settlers first erect are constructed in the rudest manner. Round logs, from fifteen to twenty feet long, are laid horizontally over each other, and notched in at the corners to allow them to come along the walls within about an inch of each other. One is first laid on each side to begin the walls, then one at each end, and the building is raised in this manner by a succession of logs crossing and binding each other at the corners, until seven or eight feet high. The seams are closed with moss or clay; three or four rafters are then raised to support the roof, which is covered with boards, or with the rinds of birch or spruce trees, bound down with poles tied together with withes.
A wooden framework, placed on a stone foundation, is raised a few feet from the ground, and, leading through the roof with its sides closed up with clay and straw kneaded together, forms a chimney. A space large enough for a door, and another for a window, is then cut through the walls; and in the centre of the cabin a square pit or cellar is dug, for the purpose of preserving potatoes or other vegetables during winter. Over this pit a floor of boards, or of logs hewn flat on the upper side, is laid, and another overhead to form a sort of garret. When a door is hung, a window-sash with six or more panes of glass is fixed and a cupboard and two or three bed-stocks put up: the habitation is then considered ready to receive the new settler and his family. Although such a dwelling has nothing attractive in its appearance, unless it be its rudeness, yet it is by no means so uncomfortable a lodging as the habitations of the poor peasantry in Ireland, and in some parts of England and Scotland. New settlers who have means build much better houses at first, with two or more rooms; but the majority of emigrants live for a few years in habitations similar to the one here described.
M’Gregor, like Johnstone, describes accurately the cellar pit dug in the middle, well away from the walls and the frosty ground, in which vegetables that could survive the winter were stored. This was still common practice in the mid-Twentieth Century, and I remember vividly the horror of being sent down into that dark, salamander-infested hole to bring up vegetables of dubious quality for our meals.
My final extract is taken from an autobiographical work by the great medical man, Sir Andrew MacPhail whose home is still standing at Orwell and in use as a hospitality centre. In 1939, he wrote a brilliant description of how logs were squared and prepared for assembly into a log house. Based on personal observation, he literally makes it look like child’s play. MacPhail also suggests that the log house was not seen as a permanent dwelling but a home for “some years.”
In the latter part of his account, he provides a very rare description of how boards were cut by hand before the advent of water mills, using a saw pit. It must have been a hellish experience, especially for the person in the pit, to be showered with coarse wet sawdust from the two-handled saw moving up and down. To give you an idea of what that was like I include a drawing of the process that I found in Wikipedia.
From: MacPhail, Sir Andrew, The Master’s Wife, J. MacPhail and D. Lindsay, Montreal, 1939; reissued in facsimile, with an introduction by Ian Ross Robertson, by the Institute of Island Studies, Charlottetown, 1994. PP. 12-14.
To build a house in those days was a simple affair. The tools required for a beginning were a chalk-line and black-stick, a narrow ax, a broad-ax and a whipsaw. A tree was felled, trimmed of branches, and cut to proper length. A strip of the bark was removed. The line was fixed by a brad-awl or nail at one end, it was blackened by passing it over a black-stick, which was a piece of alder-wood charred in the fire. Then the line was drawn taut along the white strip, lifted in the middle, and let go. A black line was left, by which the log could be hewn to a flat surface. With his ax the workman bit into the log to the line at intervals of a foot. With his broad-ax, which has a short handle set off from the blade for greater freedom, he slashed off the sections between the cuts at a single stroke. The log was turned on the flat, and the process repeated until a squared timber was secured.
Sills, posts, plates. rafters, joists, studs, were hewn from trees of corresponding size. The boards were ripped from the largest logs. A pit like a long grave was dug and skids were laid across. The log was rolled on these. One boy would enter the pit; the other would stand upon the timber, and with a two-handled saw they would rip off the boards, the top-sawyer guiding the cut, the bottom-sawyer doing most of the work. For shingles the log was sawn across in short lengths. The block was split with a wide iron wedge; the pieces were thinned at the end with a draw-knife, and the edges made true with a jack-plane. When the lumber was assembled the building of the house was a mere diversion, and the boys learned their trade as the work progressed. To build a framed house was a long labour, and these two young pioneers with their mother were, like their neighbours, content for some years with a house built of unhewn logs; but this is not a book on architecture.
Woodcut of saw pit from Wikipedia.
When I was working at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s, I came across this not very clear photograph dated Orwell 1918. It is perhaps the most important photograph ever taken of a log house on the Island because it records a number of features we have by now come to recognise as basic to local construction techniques. The logs are squared, and the wood of the dovetailed joints has been cut back into the body of the building so that a corner board could be nailed or pegged on. This unusual feature, which at first looks like a decorative corner board, is in fact an attempt to protect the dovetailed corners from early rot, as by their nature such joints will attract and hold water, eventually causing the joints to fail. The chimney, set against the gable end of the house, is clearly made of plank and one must imagine it covered somehow with a substantial layer of mud or brick clay. In time the wood would become partly carbonized from the constant heat and that would have made it less inclined to quick ignition if a fire developed in the chimney.
Photo of a settler and his wife standing to their log house. The picture is dated 1918 and is labelled “Orwell Corner.” Photo by R. Porter c. 1985. This photograph is now believed to be in the PEI Museum Photographic Collection at PARO.
The house is a central plan with six-over-six sashed windows flanking the door, which is generously wide. Flowers, and perhaps herbs, no doubt brought from Scotland, are planted along the base of the house which one imagines sits on a layer or two of field or quarried stone.
The photograph below shows very clearly the cut back necessary to protect the dovetailed joints with corner or weather boards. This practice of corner boards was not new but had been used in frame houses for centuries. Examples of various corner terminations and corner boards are found on the Island and will be discussed on my future post on frame houses.
Corner of log house from the recreated Selkirk Settlement
at Belfast. Photo R. Porter 1981.
This photograph of Paul Coles, a Charlottetown contractor and restorer of old houses, shows him examining the tremendous gaps between squared logs in the walls of a house he restored in Charlottetown. This is not something we expect to see in such carefully constructed structures but in this case, whether or not they are the result of incompetent construction in the first place, they clearly illustrate the amount of work required in sealing those large gaps.
Here is a photo of the Rustico Doucet log house wall whose chinks were filled with brick clay, all of which was then covered with birch bark before the cladding was added.
Photo courtesy of Carter Jeffery
The story of log houses on the Island, and cities like Charlottetown still remains to be told. We have been looking at pictures and reading text that help to tell the story in the broadest sense of the log house interval in our architecture, but much remains to be learned, measured, photographed and interpreted.
New Discoveries – 15, Hillsborough Street
From time-to-time contractors renovating old houses discover that they are indeed remnants from the time of the log house. Such a house is located at 15 Hillsborough Street in Charlottetown and when in 2016 the later cladding was stripped there was enormous publicity and excitement as everybody rushed to see, as it were, open heart surgery on a log house. During the time of renovation the house became a schoolroom for those interested in the minutiae of log construction.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/charlottetown-pei-log-home-1.3488159
https://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=6188
The house is believed to have been built before 1850 on land owned by the Adams family of New London. By 1850 Master mariner George Harris was living in it. Its present location is not the original one. At some time before 1923 the house was moved several street numbers to this location in order for F. N. Kays, a local businessman to build a new house on the spot. The links above will provide more detailed information on its history and renovation.
Thus, we come to the end of this attempt to provide an account of the various kinds of log houses built on the Island by the French and British settlers. It is an account that is sadly lacking in many details – names, dates, ethnic origins, stylistic differences, plans of interiors – and most of all the reasons for why things are they are. It is an open-ended story.
A Special Resource
Dr. Douglas Sobey, as part of his life-long work on Island forests, has for many years shown a deep interest in the log house, and like me, has gathered all the information that could be found. In the Number 86, 2020 Fall/Winter issue of the Island Magazine Doug wrote an article called “Log Houses on Prince Edward Island.” It is deeply interesting and a vital piece of scholarship. The Magazine published the article in bilingual format which I have always found extremely difficult to sort through. In the process of publishing, pictures are separated from their associated text for design purposes, the original text is edited and mysterious boxes with mini essays appear. It is all very distracting. I asked Doug if he would allow me to publish in this blog his original draft submitted to the Magazine so readers like myself could have rapid and unobstructed access to his considerable body of data that is vital to the study of the log house on Prince Edward Island. He kindly consented. I include both versions of the article in the bibliography.
Sobey – Log Houses on PEI for the Island Magazine 2020
Resources
Bealer, Alex W. and photos by John O. Ellis, The Log Cabin – Homes of the North American Wilderness, Barre Publishing, Barra, Massachusetts, 1978.
Bickenheuser, Cathy; Snodgrass, Kathleen. Dovetails and Broadaxes: Hands–on Log Cabin Preservation. Missoula, MT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Missoula Technology and Development Center. 2015.
Bremner, Benjamin, An Island Scrapbook, Irwin Printing Company Limited, Charlottetown, 1932.
E.L.M. (Elizabeth L. MacDonald), “Charlottetown Fifty Years Ago,” The Prince Edward Island Magazine, 9 articles, Charlottetown, 1901. Digitised, re-formatted and ilustrated by Reg Porter, 1989 – 2019.
Hale, Richard W. Jnr., ‘The French Side of “The Log-Cabin Myth” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 72, Oct. 1957 – Dec. 1960, pp. 118-25, 1957.
Jeffery, Carter W and Arnold G. Smith, Conservation Report: The Doucet House, Grand Pére Point, Rustico, Unlimited Drafting Inc., / P.E.I. Heritage Designs, Hunter River, PEI, 2001.
Jelks, Frank W., The Parish of Charlotte and the Church of Saint Paul’s, Privately Printed, 1990.
Johnstone, Walter. A Series of Letters, Descriptive of Prince Edward Island, in the Gulph of St. Lawrence. Dumfries: Printed for the Author, by J. Swan. 1822
Kniffen, Fred, and Henry Glassie, “Building in Wood in the Eastern United States: A Time-Place Perspective,” Geographical Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Jan. 1966), pp. 40-66, Published by the American Geographical Society, 1966.
MacDonald, Elizabeth L. see E.L.M.
MacPhail, Sir Andrew, The Master’s Wife, J. MacPhail and D. Lindsay, Montreal, 1939; reissued in facsimile, with an introduction by Ian Ross Robertson, by the Institute of Island Studies, Charlottetown, 1994.
M’Gregor, John. British America. Volume II, Second Edition. William Blackwood, Edinburgh; and T Cadell, Strand London. 1823, Pp 558-559
Mercer, Henry C., Ancient Carpenters’ Tools – Illustrated and Explained, Together with the Implements of the Lumberman, Joiner and Cabinet-Maker in Use in the Eighteenth Century, Dover Publications, New York, 1975, 2000.
Moogk, Peter N., Building a House in New France – An Account of the Perplexities of Client and Craftsmen in Early Canada, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1977.
Pollard, James B., Historical Sketch of the Eastern Regions of New France from the various Dates of their Discoveries to the Surrender of Louisburg, 1758, also Prince Edward Island, Military and Civil. Printed by John Coombs, Charlottetown, 1898.
Porter, Reginald, The Architecture of Methodism in Charlottetown, Electronically printed, Charlottetown, 2018.
Porter Reginald and David Webber, Catalogue of the exhibition: Charlottetown the First Hundred Years, held at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, February 9 to May 3, 1987. Work in Progress. 1987-
Rempel, John I., Building with Wood, – and other aspects of nineteenth-century building in central Canada. (Revised edition). University of Toronto Press, Chapter 2, (pp. 25-90), 1980.
Rogers, Irene, Reports on Selected Buildings in Charlottetown, P.E.I., Manuscript Report Series, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1974, 1976. Pp. 124-125.
Rogers, Irene L., Charlottetown – The Life in its Buildings, The Prince Edward Island Museum and Heritage Foundation, Charlottetown, 1983.
Shurtleff, Harold R., The Log-Cabin Myth: a Study of the Early Dwellings of the English Colonists in North America, Harvard University Press, 1939.
Simpson, St John, and Svetlana Pankova, The BP Exhibition: Scythians Warriors of Ancient Siberia, Thames and Hudson and the British Museum, London, 2017.
Sloane, Eric, A Museum of Early American Tools, Ballentine Books, New York, 1964, 2002.
Sloane, Eric, A Reverence for Wood, Ballentine Books, New York, 1965, 1974.
Sloane, Eric, Diary of an Early American Boy – Noah Blake 1805, Ballentine Books, New York, 1965.
Sobey, Doug, “Log Houses on Prince Edward Island” + “Maisons pièce sur pièce à l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard,” The Island Magazine, Number 86, Fall/Winter 2020, The Prince Edward Island Museum & Heritage Foundation, Charlottetown.
Turner, Orsamus, “The Pioneer Settler upon the Holland Purchase, and His Progress,” Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4, Oct. 1975, pp. 425-435, Oxford University Press 1975.
Weslager, C. A., The Log Cabin in America – From Pioneer Days to the Present, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New jersey, 1969.