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Updated: June 5, 2025
Being young backwoodsmen this was but a trifle to them. All four of them knew how to handle an axe with dexterity. The logs were soon cut and notched, and a small cabin was put up, and roofed with split clap-boards. With the stones that lay near the shore of the lake they built a chimney. It was but a rude structure, but it drew admirably.
No man knew better than he how to shape the logs, notch them, and lay them firmly in their beds no man knew better how to split the `clap-boards, lay them on the rafters, and bind them fast, without even a single nail no man knew how to `chink' the walls, clay the chimney, and hang the door of a log-cabin better than Cudjo. No.
The paint was almost gone from the clap-boards, the window-panes were broken and patched with rags, and the garden was a poisonous tangle of nettles, burdocks and tall swamp-weeds over which big blue-bottles hummed. At the sound of wheels a child with a tow-head and pale eyes like Liff Hyatt's peered over the fence and then slipped away behind an out-house.
Beecher often talked about those days and said that bye and bye he would retire and they would again go back to the simple life they had enjoyed so much. When he had built his new home near the Hudson, Robert Collier and I visited him. We found in the rear of an addition that clap-boards had been put up in all sorts of adjustment. Mr.
On one slope, the roof was deeply weather-stained, and, nigh the turfy eaves-trough, all velvet-napped; no doubt the snail-monks founded mossy priories there. The other slope was newly shingled. On the north side, doorless and windowless, the clap-boards, innocent of paint, were yet green as the north side of lichened pines or copperless hulls of Japanese junks, becalmed.
These we knew would tighten as they dried, and press the pole firmer than ever against the boards. "We now laid a second row of the clap-boards with their lower ends riding the upper ones of the first row, and thus securing them. The second row was in its turn secured by a horizontal pole, along its bottom, and at its top by the lower ends of the third row; and so on up to the ridge.
"The other side was shingled in a similar manner; and the ridge itself was secured against leakage, by allowing the clap-boards, on one side, to project upwards, and shelter the ends of those on the other. This gave our cabin quite a chanticleer sort of comb along its top, and added to the picturesqueness of its appearance.
This day was appropriated to roofing it. We first laid a row of the clap-boards, projecting considerably over the eaves so as to cast the water far out. These we secured near their lower ends by a long straight pole, which traversed the roof horizontally from gable to gable, and was lashed down by strips of wet elk-hide.
A piazza it enjoyed, of course; it must be a pitiful village inn that does not: and building, accessaries and all, rejoiced in several coats of a spurious white lead. The columns of this piazza, as well as the clap-boards of the house itself however, exhibited the proofs of the danger of abandoning your true whittler to his own instincts.
But their habitations were clumsy and miserable huts, and having no chaises, all travellers were exposed in open boats or on horseback to the violent heat of the climate. Their houses were constructed of wood, by erecting first a wooden frame, and then covering it with clap-boards without, and plastering it with lime within, of which they had plenty made from oyster-shells.
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