Milford News | 1938-04-28 | Page 2 | Log Cabin, Soddy or House of Stone-All have been 'Home, Sweet Home'

Log Cabin, Soddy or House of Stone Ali Have Been 'Home, Sveef Home1 Celebration of 'Better Homes Week" Recalls Evolution of American Houses from the Days When the Pioneer's Cabin Was Both a Dwelling Place and a Fortress Down to Houses of the Present With Their Great Variety of Architecture and Building Materials. Western Newspaper Union. By ELMO SCOTT WATSON AMONG the multifarious "weeks" we are called upon to observe each year is one that is associated with an idea very dear to the hearts of all Americans. That is Better Homes Week, April 24 to 30. For we Americans give to the word "home" a sentimental senti-mental attachment which we bestow upon no other word, with the possible exception of "mother." "Home Sweet Home" and "My Old Kentucky Ken-tucky Home" and "Old Folks at Home" are still among our' best-beloved folk songs and "Tin Pan Alley" knows that the chances are better than 50-50 for writing a "sure-fire hit" if it can get "home" in the title of a new song or build the theme of it around that word. Has any popular song of recent years showed greater promise of enduring permanently than Billy Hill's "Home on the Range"? Yes,- we Americans love our homes, even though we are sometimes called "the most restless people on earth" who, in these days of the automobile and the hard road, seem to spend as little time as possible in them. 'Twas not always thus, of course, as a glance back en who lived in this combined home and fortress against whose thick walls the tides of savage hatred beat in vain. By the middle of the Nineteenth century the log cabin had become be-come a symbol of American democracy. de-mocracy. It, with its allied symbols sym-bols of frontier life, the coonskin and hard cider, helped send William Wil-liam Henry Harrison to the White House and long after the frontier era had passed, one of the surest sur-est ways for a candidate for office of-fice to appeal successfully to the electorate was to emphasize the fact that he was "born in a log cabin." Even in these modern days memories of the log cabin era survive in our everyday speech. When you invite someone to visit you, do you assure him that he will "always find the latchstring out"? Your log-cabin-dwelling grandfather used that term and he meant that a buckskin thong, pushed through a hole in the stout oak door of his home, would be hanging down outside. When the visitor pulled the string, it lifted the latch, a bar of wood, from its slot so that he could push the door open and walk in. Although that era is long past, it does not mean that it is forgotten. for-gotten. Significant of the fact, that Americans still cherish the log cabin as the symbol of a way of life that was somehow freer and happier than the one they know in this machine age, is the nostalgic attempt by many of them to recapture the past by ?jfegfflpte A Typical Log Cabin Home of the Early American Pioneers. building log cabins in which to spend their vacations. Ernest Thompson Seton once wrote a magazine article in which he told how a group of men joined together to do that. Of the result he said: "And what had we got? Something Some-thing out of the woods, conquered out of the woods by ourselves, a mixture of nature and human enthusiasm, en-thusiasm, a something which we could not but love, for it was a part of ourselves. We had contacted con-tacted the wild woods at almost every point without any intermediary." inter-mediary." When the frontier had been pushed beyond the forest-clad lands east of the Mississippi and began spreading across the great plains of the West, the pioneer had a new home-building problem. prob-lem. Timber was scarce and what there was, mostly cotton-wood cotton-wood and elm, made poor lum- The "Soddy" Frontier Home on the Great Plains of the West. through our history will show. If, as one of our popular modern writers of verse says, "It takes a heap o' livin' To make a house a home." then we had real homes back in the days when our pioneering forefathers lived in log cabins. For they certainly did a "heap o' livin' " in houses of that kind. Not only was it a place of rest for the pioneer after a hard day's work clearing the forest, but it was also his bulwark of defense against one of the most redoubtable redoubt-able foes in history the Indian warrior. Truly the log cabin was the American pioneer's castle in a more literal sense than Sir Edward Ed-ward Coke, the famous English jurist of the Sixteenth century could ever have realized when he declared that "a man's house is his castle." For the story of the American frontier is a saga of the stout-hearted men and wom- ber, for it warped and twisted while drying in the sun. So, with characteristic versatility, he turned to the only material available avail-able and made it serve his purpose. pur-pose. Thus came into being the type of pioneer home known as . the sod house or "soddy." Selecting a likely site for his new horse he hitched his yoke of oxen to a prairie-breaking plow, the only implement that could cut through the tough sod with its interlaced roots of grass and prairie plants. Setting his plow to a depth of about three inches, he ran a long straight furrow as near to the location of his soddy as possible so that he would not have the task of moving his "building materials" so far. Strips of sod a foot wide and three feet long were then brought to the site of the new house and the building begun. After the dimensions of the house had been decided upon, the ground was smoothed off so that a space was left for the walls, which were two feet or more thick. The growing grass was left on the sod and this formed the chinks between be-tween the layers, so that it was not necessary to chink up the spaces between the layers of sod. The walls were built up to a height of seven or eight feet, openings being left for the windows win-dows and doors which were recessed re-cessed into the walls for a distance dis-tance of a foot or more. After the walls were completed a ridgepole was secured. It was usually a native tree, with other smaller trees or branches to be used for rafters or supporters. Brush was thrown over this, then a layer of prairie hay or s.traw, after which the sod roof was put on, the layers being leveled off and chinked up so that not a drop of water entered. Doors and windows were then made by the homesteader from native lumber or from the boxes. Few of the first soddies had glass in their windows. Oiled paper or muslin was used instead. The soddy was now ready for the pioneer and his family to live in. In many instances, to make it more attractive, a coat of whitewash was given the inside walls. It was made from native lime, which he secured from the hills along the river and burned himself. Most of the pioneer soddies sod-dies had no wood floors, the floors being made of clay which was dampened and tamped down until un-til it was 'smooth and even. With its walls two feet thick and its roof from eight inches to a foot thick, the soddy made a comfortable home for the pioneer family warm in the winter when one of those terrible blizzards swept across the plains and cool in the summer when the hot sun beat down upon it from a cloudless cloud-less sky and blistering winds swept over it. And, like the log cabin of his Eastern forefathers it was a veritable fortress which could resist Indian attack, especially espe-cially when its defenders were armed with those straight-shooting Kentucky long rifles or heavy Sharps buffalo guns. With the passing of the frontier fron-tier era on the plains, the pioneers pio-neers and the sons and daughters of the pioneers who no longer needed to live in these combination combina-tion homes and prairie fortresses, began building houses of wood, stone and brick similar to those in the East. Americans today East and West and North and South live in houses as varied in architecture as this broad land of ours is varied in its soil, its climate and its traditions. While one style may predominate in one section of a country, you are quite likely to find examples of it anywhere in the United States a New England type in California, Califor-nia, a Southern Colonial in Minnesota, Min-nesota, a Spanish type in Massachusetts. Massa-chusetts. With the growth of our cities came new housing problems and out of them were evolved apartment apart-ment buildings with many families fami-lies living under one roof. But there are signs that the tide, j(ss j j si jg III' iKr" " d'hoto. courtesy l-ederal Housing Acliu(nllratiou.) A Modern Low-Cost American Home. which swept increasing numbers of people into the cities and produced pro-duced congested centers of population, popu-lation, is now beginning to ebb and to carry some of these numbers num-bers out into the suburbs and into the smaller towns. More and more Americans are beginning to want to live in their own homes, individual houses with yards and gardens and "elbow-room." "elbow-room." And with that desire is coming the desire expressed in the week we celebrate from April 24 to 30 the desire for "better homes."