2011 Cavanagh, If Walls Could Speak

8/12/2019 2011 Cavanagh, If Walls Could Speak

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Article: AmericanHeritage (revisions to paragraphs 3, 4 & 5) November 16, 2012 page 1

If Walls Could SpeakA Short History of American House Construction

Henry Mitchell has lived in the house next door to mine all of his eighty-five years. He keeps an

eye on my renovation, and I often pause, hammer in hand, to listen to him describe the way his

father built his house those many years ago. When I return to my previous task pulling a square

rusty spike or deconstructing a joint in the heavy timbers I am more conscious of the original

carpenter who built my house a century and a half ago. I can imagine his effort, the reciprocal of

mine today, heading the spike from nail rod, chiseling the mortise-and-tenon, and erecting the

heavy timbers. Henry can make my walls speak.

Between the world of 1850 and our own, the construction of houses has changed dramatically. In

the nineteenth century carpenters "built" houses, today they "finish" houses. In North America,

builders have abandoned the bit-and-brace, the plane, and the chisel, and replaced wood joinery

with light-wood framing of butted joints and nailed connections. The way we build, the materials

we use, and the demands we place on our houses represent a fundamental change in cultural

attitude from that of our ancestors. Sometime, somewhere a radical revision a revolutionary

technology has transformed our houses.

"Frame" houses built before 1850 were constructed with large timbers. Since sawing was wasteful

in terms of labour and material (early saws made wide cuts in the wood), logs were often simply

squared for ease of connection. The connections were chiseled from the timbers themselves and

then the joints were individually fitted. This required a practised hand particularly in places

that involved intricate geometries such as at the top corner of an exterior wall where four timbers

meet in one joint. It is no wonder that houses often took an entire building season to complete.

Our current "cut and butt" system of light-wood framing can be traced back to an earlier version

with a rather bizarre name the "balloon" frame. In the early nineteenth century, new milling

technologies introduced mass-produced lumber and nails and the balloon frame took full


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advantage of both, relying on the quantity and not the quality of the individual joints. This

radically altered our way of building, saved countless hours and required far less skill, and

house-building was never the same again.

Its introduction represented a decisive change in how people built their houses, a kind of proto-

industrial building process. The story of its origins is an interesting one, full of debate and

conjecture was there a "Eureka!" moment of invention? or, was the process one of gradual

change? and, how did it get such a bizarre name?

the way we build our houses

The method of constructing a balloon frame house is quite similar to the way we build most of

our houses today. The walls are made up of many 2x4 verticals (studs) nailed together while they

are lying flat on the wooden platform of the ground floor, the wall is squared, and then tilted up

into place. In the balloon frame, these walls and their studs extend the full two-storey height of

the building. Today, one-storey stud walls are more common. This height differential is the major

distinction between balloon and contemporary light-wood frame construction.

Balloon frame is structurally and materially efficient. It is strong and light a substantial

improvement in strength-to-weight ratio over the log or timber frame. Builders nail the frame, the

sheathing and the clapboards to each other in many places. Each nailed connection contributes to

the overall strength of the building. Because no joint is more important than any other, there has

to be only a statistical probability of a good connection between adjacent wood members. An

individual joint may fail due to a rogue piece of wood or a poor nailing job, but the overall

structure is sufficiently redundant that the whole will maintain its integrity. It is this conception

of many semi-rigid joints contributing to an overall rigid structure that is the major conceptual

departure from heavy timber frame.1

The first known publication of a refined version of balloon frame was by William E. Bell in his

construction manual of 1858. Bell had been building balloon frame houses for fifteen years prior


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to publishing a description of its method of assembly.2He presented balloon frame as a clarified

and codified building system, and recommended materials and techniques appropriate to

various building applications.

It was an example of a "progressive" modification of conventional building practices. These

progressive practices reduced craft labor, produced components industrially, revised the method

of assembly, simplified the joint or developed an identifiable connector, employed light-weight

materials, and/or improved structural efficiency. This was progress, indeed, but only to a certain

point; house construction never became fully automated and has consistently resisted the many

initiatives to move this proto-industrial form of construction into fully industrialized factory

assembly. So, it was an innovation, but one that has been surprisingly resistant to change.

the enterprising midwest frontier

Probably, the shift in the way Americans built their houses was initiated in the midwest. In the

nineteenth century, there was an incredible demand for new houses in the context of a set of

rapidly changing wood technologies. The American settler starting a farm or a business near the

Mississippi was in a foreign landscape populated by many cultures. Physically, the prairie was

unfamiliar farmland and, at least initially, it was considered impossible to farm. The Americans

were one culture among many. French, Spanish, Amerindian, and European languages made up

a multilingual society that was to eventually establish a distinctly midwestern culture. For all

these reasons, it's not too surprising that the peoples of the Missouri and Illinois frontier were

creating an innovative way of building as they were constructing a new culture.

One of the first enterprises that settlers built in a newly populated area was a saw mill. These

mills contributed to the millions of board feet of lumber already produced in Pittsburgh and west

along the major rivers of the region. Chances are, if the settler's house was near a river, then it

would be built of sawn plank. So, our image of the log cabin in the wilderness is only partly true,

as related in this traveler's account of Indiana in the early 1830s: "Near the centre of the prairie,

upon a charming little lake, was the county seat, Laporte. So new and so evidently temporary


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beginnings of the frontier town, in this case emphasized by the condensed time-frame, was a

recurring context for vernacular building.

Hall's account describes the vernacular American architecture as an innovative combination of

varied constructions and building forms. This is raw commercial culture. It is an account of

builders who, in each different context, integrated new ideas while choosingto honour certaintraditional ways. This is a description of an emergent way of doing things in the nineteenth

century, a popular culture of building, and a primary source of innovation.

the story of invention

The frontier is an integral part of the history of balloon frame construction whether you believe it

originated with a sudden, dramatic invention or with a gradual and more subtle adaptation of

traditional ways of building. In this article, I will raise doubts about the story of invention for a

number of reasons. I believe that most innovative construction methods are a product of the

cumulative effort of all builders. There are certain times in history when innovations accumulate

to the point where a completely new way of building overturns the old way of doing things.

However, despite some general dissatisfaction, the story of the invention of the balloon frame still

has many advocates. Some of the strongest proponents of its invention are Chicagoans, partly

because it is an important founding myth of their city and, for that reason alone, the story

deserves to be told.

Balloon frame is an important part of the general history of the foundation of Chicago and is

credited with a significant role in the explosive growth of the Midwest. (It is also depreciated as

one of the contributing factors to the Chicago fire of 1872 the two-storey space between the

studs acted as a fire-spreading chimney.) The story starts in 1833, when Chicago was just a year

old and a carpenter named Augustine Deodat Taylor arrived from Connecticut.5Taylor was the

epitome of Yankee ingenuity: he was asked to build large numbers of houses in the vast treeless

prairie and responded by inventing balloon frame.


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Several historians contend that the original balloon frame building was St. Mary's Catholic

Church in Chicago, built by Taylor or perhaps George Washington Snow, a local merchant who

traded in lumber. In fact, the story of invention now includes three possibilities, involving these

two men and two buildings: either Snow was the inventor, based on a 1832 warehouse or St.

Mary's church, or Taylor was the inventor, based on St. Mary's church. The church was the first

or second place of worship built in Chicago and was moved a number of times before it was

eventually torn down.

Due to the church's location near the mouth of the Chicago River, no archaeological evidence is

likely to surface. No drawings and no later deed descriptions have been found to support the

story of the invention of the balloon frame, but there are some suggestive and tantalizing

indications of early light-wood building in Chicago. Caroline Clarke mentions them in a letter to

her sister: "The buildings now are mostly small, and look as though they have been put up as

quickly as possible, many of them are what they call here Balloon houses, that is built of boards

entirely not a stick of timber in them except the sills."6The travel writer Charles Latrobe reports:

"The interior of the village [Chicago, 1833] was one chaos of mud, rubbish, and confusion. Frame

and clapboard houses were springing up daily under the active axes and hammers of the

speculators, and piles of lumber announced the preparation for yet other edifices of equally light

character."7Latrobe's references to lightness and "frame and clapboard" clearly suggest balloon

frame.

One possible explanation might be that the church, and even the warehouse, was a form of

balloon frame and that this method of construction was already in use in the Midwest. It is

possible that different innovative aspects were developed at various times in separate buildings,

such as: the first building to use two-storey studs with a let-in ribbon at the second floor, the first

building to use no mortise-and-tenon joints, the first building of "scantling and siding," the first

building to use dimension lumber, and so on all definitive instances of balloon frame. St.

Mary's, probably a one-storey building with heavy timber sills, was not the first comprehensive


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example of balloon frame. At the very least, St. Mary's Catholic Church must have been just one

of many innovative steps, as it was a one-storey building supposedly based on a two-storey

construction system.

No record indicates that Taylor or Snow ever made a claim to the invention or built any other

buildings in the balloon frame. Even during their lifetimes, when various authors published

books on the balloon frame and on Chicago, they did not comment or respond.8By that time,

balloon frame was a construction method of some significance, and was hotly debated in the

agricultural and architectural press.9The complete absence of any proprietary claim especially

in this era of patents and inventions suggests that no individual was responsible for balloon

frame.

frontier conditions

In 1833, wood was variable in dimension and quality. In the balloon frame, an individual joint

may fail due to a rogue piece of wood or a poor nailing job, but the overall structure is

sufficiently redundant that the whole will maintain its integrity. Nevertheless, the structure

cannot accept general misbehavior and, to a large degree, building rigidity depends on lumber of

a uniform dimension and behaviour. Charles Cleaver, in a contemporary comment about the

lumber supply in Chicago, described the potentially disastrous results: "In its green state in

drying it will shrink, warp and twist in every way, drawing out the nails, and, after a summer

has passed, the siding will gape open, letting the wind through every joint. Such was the stuff

used for building in 1833 and 1834."

Dimension lumber reacts differently than timber or even planks. Selecting lumber needs a trained

eye, and seasoning and storing it is just as critical. Assembling it into a building requires an

allowance for expansion and contraction. Lumber was essentially a new and experimental

product for house structure in the 1830s. It was probably the potential for buildings to tear

themselves apart, as much as to collapse structurally, that made early balloon frame houses so

risky to build.


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Early balloon framing might have been risky for another reason: ordinarily, it takes builders

longer to produce innovative examples. New developments need more time, energy, care,

dexterity, and judgment both before construction, when the design is being planned, and

during construction, when builders must cautiously consider the possible design improvements

or mistakes while assembling the prototype. It is questionable whether carpenters, who were in

great demand in early Chicago, would have been disposed to initiate a time-consuming

experiment. Observers noted that Taylor built St. Mary's Church quickly, 10perhaps because it

was not a time-consuming prototype but a method of construction that Taylor had already seen

or used. Taylor more than likely had seen balloon frame buildings in St. Louis, the year before his

arrival in Chicago.11For all the reasons outlined above, the story of invention is suspect and it is

unlikely that such a complex building technique was invented in one instantaneous, imaginative

act.

everyday innovators and the notion of gradual adaptation

I would like to believe that balloon frame originated as an innovative hybrid formed by the

cultural fusion of various types of vernacular construction. In the early nineteenth century, the

Midwest was made up of many cultures indigenous and expatriated Amerindian, French,

Spanish, Americans from the east, and immigrants from Europe. This led to cultural encounters

where ways of doing things overlapped, a middle ground which created hybrid techniques and

situations.

Picture this delightful scene describing the strong diverse culture of Midwest settlers: "He

showed us a bookcase filled with books about this country; these he had collected for years, and

become so familiar with the localities that, on coming here at last, he sought and found at once

the very spot he wanted There is that mixture of culture and rudeness in the aspect of things

as gives a feeling of freedom, not of confusion. The young ladies were musicians, and spoke

French fluently, having been educated in a convent. Here in the prairie, they had learned to take

care of the milk-room, and kill the rattlesnakes that assailed their poultry yard. Beneath the shade


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of heavy curtains you looked out from the high and large windows to see Norwegian peasants at

work in their national dress."12This description of a landscape was recorded in 1843 by the

philosopher and journalist Margaret Fuller.

Accompany Charles Hoffman into a dance party a decade earlier: you are "ushered into a

tolerably sized dancing-room, occupying the second story of the house, and having its unfinished

walls so ingeniously covered with pine-branches and flags borrowed from the garrison, that with

the white washed ceiling above it presented a very complete and quite pretty appearance. It was

not so warm, however, that the fires of cheerful hickory, which roared at either end, could have

been readily dispensed with. it was such a complete medley of all ranks, ages, professions,

trades and occupations brought together from all parts of the world, and now for the first time

brought together, that it was amazing to witness the decorum with which they commingled on

this festive occasion."13These are not the clich descriptions of pioneering on the American

frontier.

In this exciting and varied context, the balloon frame gradually emerged as a popular hybrid of

many ways of building. To end the story, I offer an answer to one final question: What does the

name mean? The usual story about the name "balloon" is wrong it was not a scornful nickname

fabricated to suggest that this new way of construction was ridiculously light. Looking into the

source of the name, it turns out that "balloon" has many more potential meanings in French than

in English. Probably, it was a popular term that already identified a distinct way of building, an

anglicized version of a term used in the French settlements along the Mississippi River.

Perhaps typical to these villages is this description of a house, transcribed from a deed written in

Missouri French and in a reasonably clear hand: " a dwelling place located on [the river bank]

and three miles from this village on which there is a half-enclosed field, a balloon house and a

natural spring The date on this document, which describes a house being purchased, is 1804

thirty-one years prior to the earliest reference in Chicago. The official phrasing in the document


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suggests that "maison en Boullin"defined a particular sort of building technique that was in

common use by the French along the Mississippi River in the first years of the nineteenth century.

The village referred to in the document is Ste. Genevieve, Missouri: a vibrant, historic town on

the banks of the Mississippi. There are many buildings built by the French that still stand and

some of these are interesting precursors to the balloon frame. Typically, the French constructed

houses made with palisade walls: vertical wooden posts placed side by side at 16 inches centre-

to-centre with a continuous plate nailed across the top. I suspect they built the walls flat and then

tilted them up into trenches in the ground. Eventually, this palisade construction was modified

such that the posts were nailed onto timber sills resting on foundations. At this point, the method

of construction is close to the basic process of the balloon frame substitute small dimension

lumber for the posts and it is closer still. One only has to suggest that the French and the

Americans learned from each other and then there is a believable story of a hybrid form of

construction generated gradually from the vernacular building techniques of different cultures.

America's culture of wood

Today, ninety percent of us live in light-wood frame houses. The way we build (and the house

forms that result) has a subtle, pervasive influence on the American way of life. Most of us share

common sensory memories of construction the abrupt whine of the Skil saw, the pine smell of

saw dust, the overlapping stacattoes of framing hammers. Some of us have paused to listen to

Bob Vila as we flip through the television channels, remembering a summer job or a weekend

renovation. As North Americans, we have a very special way of building houses. This is a shared

memory of our culture.

In other cultures these descriptions would evoke no bodily memories. European immigrants to

this country regard wooden houses as ephemera, for them residences should be permanencies

and bear heavily on the ground. Stone and brick are their materials of choice. Recently, some

Japanese builders reconstructing Kobe are adopting our ways, but our current techniques of


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wood framing its procedures, assumptions and conventions need to be translated. How does

a nail work anyway? The cultural differences are substantial.

Building remains one of our basic cultural activities and balloon frame construction is uniquely

North American a hybrid building technique of a multicultural society physical evidence of

the vital relationship between building technology and building culture.

1

See Tom F. Peters, "American Culture of Construction," Perspecta25 (1989): 142-161.

2Bell, William E. , Carpentry Made Easy(Philadelphia, 1858), 53. Bell lived in Ottawa, Illinois.

3 Hugh McCullough as quoted in Shirley S.McCord, ed., Travel Accounts of Indiana 1691-1961,

Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau. 1970. p. 148

4From Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America, 3 vol. (Edinburgh: Cadell and Co., 1829), vol.

III, 285.

5

Andreas, Alfred T., History of Chicago from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 3 vol.(Chicago:Alfred T. Andreas, 1884-1886), 145.

6 Letter from Catherine Clarke to her sister, MS (1835), collection of the Chicago Historical

Society. Boards were usually one and a half inches thick and sawn; timber was larger in

dimension and often was hand hewn.

7Charles Joseph Latrobe, The Rambler in North America, 2 vols. (London: R.B. Seeley and W.

Burnside, 1835), p. 209. There is nothing in Latrobe's earlier descriptions of New England that

suggest what he means by the terms used in his description of Chicago "plank huts," "clapboardhouses," "plank edifices," "frame and clapboard houses," and "edifices of equally light character"

(pp. 205-209). Possibly he used these different phrases to describe the same set of houses in

Chicago. The "plank huts" were built for the government commissioners who signed the treaty of

1833.


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8This included events such as the exhibit of Lyman Bridge at the 1867 Universal Exposition in

Paris. See James H. Bowen, "Buildings, Bldg. Mat'ls and Methods of Bldg.," in Reports to the U.S.

Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867, 4 vols. (Washington, 1869), and books such

as Bell, Carpentry in 1858;J. S. Wright, Chicago, Past, Present, Future (Chicago, 1868); and Hurlbut,

Chicago Antiquities in 1881.

9See the debate between Solon Robinson of Indiana and George Woodward of New York. This

occurred in various journals including The American Agriculturalist, The Country Gentlemanand

The New York Tribune.See also Gervase Wheeler,Homes for the People (New York: C. Scribner,

1858).

10Field, A Re-examination, p. 20.

11Hurlbut, Henry R., Chicago Antiquities, comprising original items and relations, letters, extracts, and

notes pertaining to Early Chicago(Chicago, 1881), 603. "Mr. [A.D.] Taylor saw Bishop Rosetti in St.

Louis in 1832. His brother, Anson went to St. Louis and brought Father St. Cyr here [1833]."

12Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 24.

13Charles Hoffman, A Winter in the West (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1966; facsimile

of 1835 edition), 41.

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2011 Cavanagh, If Walls Could Speak