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Updated: May 29, 2025
The northeast wind spared nothing. It seemed to howl to the flames: "Keep on I'll back you I'm game until daylight." Walls, partitions, gables, roofs, ridge-poles, stuff in closets, furniture, luxuries, rugs, pictures, floors, clapboards, jewels, shingles, a grand piano, guns, gowns, books, money in twenty minutes became a glowing hole in the ground.
The wife of Thomas Hartshorne, after her husband and three sons had fallen, took her younger children into the cellar, leaving an infant on a bed in the garret, fearful that its cries would betray her place of concealment if she took it with her. The Indians entered the garret and tossed the child out of the window upon a pile of clapboards, where it was afterwards found stunned and insensible.
On these shelves my sister displayed in simple order, a host of pewter plates, and dishes and spoons, scoured and bright.... Our chimney occupied most of the east end; with pots and kettles opposite the window, under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four split-bottomed chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight by ten looking glass sloped from the wall over a large towel and comb case.... We got a roof laid over head as soon as possible, but it was laid of loose clapboards split from a red-oak, and a cat might have shaken every board in our ceiling.... We made two kinds of furniture.
On some pleasant spot surrounded by a shady grove, or point of timber a new log-cabin has been built: its rough logs notched across each other at the corners, a roof of oaken clapboards, held firmly down by long poles along each course, its floor of heavy "puncheons," its broad, cheerful fireplace, large as a modern bed-room all are in the highest style of frontier architecture.
There is neither mass nor elegance; there are no lines of union with the ground; the meagre monotony of the lines of shingles and clapboards making subdivisions too small to be impressive, and too large to be overlooked, and finally, the paint, of which the outside really consists, thrusting forward its chalky blankness, as it were a standing defiance of all possibility of assimilation, all combine to form something that shall forever remain a blot in the landscape.
She was a proud and patriotic citizen, all evening. She examined the city hall, next morning. She had remembered it only as a bleak inconspicuousness. She found it a liver-colored frame coop half a block from Main Street. The front was an unrelieved wall of clapboards and dirty windows. It had an unobstructed view of a vacant lot and Nat Hicks's tailor shop.
The locality offered no other suggestion, and it was but a brief interval before the way would be retraced by the awe-stricken observer, noting with a deep interest impossible hitherto all the environment: the stark chimney of the vanished house, monumental in the weed-grown waste; the dripping forest; the roof of the barn, sleek and shining, and with rain pouring down the slant of its clapboards and splashing from its eaves; the groups of horses hitched to the scraggy apple-trees of the deserted homestead; and here and there the white canvas cover of an ox-wagon, with its yoke of steers standing with low-hung heads in the downpour.
It stood on the gentle slope of a hill, the old gray house, with its weather-beaten clapboards and its roof of ragged shingles. It was in the very lap of the road, so that the stage-driver could almost knock on the window pane without getting down from his seat, on those rare occasions when he brought "old Mis' Bascom" a parcel from Saco.
The side of the house was all covered with red stuff which looked something like cloth and something like thick paper. It was paper, and it rippled and waved in the wind. The men were putting the clapboards on outside of that red paper.
For the first time in years he turned into a certain familiar fork in the road, and all his youth came back to him as vividly as though it had been but yesterday. Half a mile up this fork was the rambling old farm-house. It was unchanged. The clapboards were still stained with rust, the barns were still a dingy red, the stone and rail fences needed the same repairs.
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