[Granville-Hough] 22 Apr 2009 - log cabin lingo

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:09:07 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: log cabin lingo 22 Apr 2009

Notes from Harold Hopkins:

Before the arrival of sawmills and planing mills, logs were smoothed
on at least one side to flatten them and make the floors level -- and
probably for other purposes in which flattening one side of the wood
was desirable or necessary -- railroad ties, etc. I'm not sure if
this is what you were talking about.

The names of these pieces of wood  -- flattened on at least one side
--  was puncheons.   They normally  were smoothed with an adze,  a
heavy bladed chopper shaped like a hoe, and swung like one by the
user.  I never saw anybody use one but I understand the adze-man
stood astride the log and worked backward.  That could get dangerous
if one's blade slipped. Very  primitive, but better I suppose, than a
round log.  Probably later planing mills were invented to perform
this almost necessary function.  I've often heard old timers refer to
cabins as having puncheon floors.  There probably were other
processes that I've never heard of that  also were used to make a
residence habitable.

When I was young, my grandmother Molly Jones's fourth husband -- whom
she married around 1932 or 1933 -- was a Cajun from the Louisiana
backwoods and bayous. His name was Hezikiah Johnston. When I was
about ten years old he taught me how to use a froe or frow to split
or rive  shingles from blocks or bolts of  cypress wood.   The
cypress wood was cut  into blocks about the length of firewood and
then a block of cypress was  first split onto viable pieces or
sections called "bolts,"  the splitter giving attention to the way
the grain ran in the wood.  A frow was a blade about  1/4 inch in
thickness, 3 inches wide and about 16-18 inches long, one end of it
being looped into a ring into which a short hickory or other wooden
handle  was planted at right angles to the blade. You would hold
this handle with your left hand and lay the sharp bottom edge or
 blade across the  top of the bolt of  cypress about a half-inch from
the outer edge, then hit the blunt back of the blade with a wooden
maul with the right hand. The cypress blocks split rather easily  or
cleanly  into boards or shingles. The grain of these large trees was
normally regular, and the shingle would normally split off cleanly
and give you a shingle of fairly even thickness and angle  and about
six to eight inches in width.  These shingles rived off the bolt of
cypress would normally be  fairly smooth and only now and then would
the grain run such as to leave a hole  or be too thick on one end.  I
can imagine that  a floor of sorts might be formed with cypress
shingles if you were patient enough, but of course in my time there
were plenty of sawmills and planing mills to smooth timber for floors
and other such uses.  Cypress is a soft wood but it's  rot and
termite resistant, particularly virgin cypress.  Most houses in our
part of Mississippi had cypress shingles for the roof, but I suppose
cedar (actually a juniper) was also used. I never split any cedar
shingles.  I have used sawn cedar pickets.  I can imagine that in a
pinch cypress boards could be flattened over a log base for flooring,
but it was used mainly for roofing.  I never really saw anybody
operating an adze of the size needed to flatten the edge of a  log.
Hezikiah Johnston also taught me how to split logs for fence posts
with axes, wedges, and mauls, and, of course, this is how rails were
made for rail fences.    In places where cypress didn't occur  in
nature, chestnut was the preferred wood for fence rails and -- for
that matter -- any kind of structure made of logs, because it was
also rot and termite  resistant.   Unfortunately, before the turn of
the 20th century, chestnut blight was imported from Europe on
European chestnuts and wiped out the American chestnut.  Even as late
as 35-40 years ago  there were isolated  American chestnut trees that
succumbed to   the Chestnut blight about the time they started
producing chestnuts -- or seed for the next generation.  I suppose
there may be a few American chestnuts here or there but they're
doomed to the blight when they reach reproductive age.  I would like
to see one.  I used to see young trees in the woods that were
arising  from dead stumps -- and there  may still be some of that. I
have always hoped that, somehow, there would be a part of the world
where these trees could grow free from the blight produced by a
fungus  called Endothia  parasiticus.

Harold


GWH.  In our old blacksmith workshop we had a frow my father had used
when he and Uncle Singleton "Sang" Ainsworth were partners in making
 longleaf pine
shingles for roofing and longleaf stakes or staves for making garden
fences. I do not know how long they worked together but my father spoke
highly of Uncle Sang who settled in the Pleasant Hill Community after he
married Aunt Banie Arender.  In our family, we had a phrase, "dull as a
frow," which may have been in common use at one time.  We used the
expression in many ways.  The function of the frow was to induce
splitting.  It had to be sharp enough to hold its place in the tree
rings at the end of the bolt, but rounded or dull enough not to get
stuck to the wood as you worked your way across the bolt making shingles
or staves.  I am told the last structures covered with longleaf pine
shingles were blown away in 1969 during Hurricane Camille.
	The exact phrase I was looking for named the process for covering the
inside rooms of a log cabin.  Uncle Aaron Miller was a carpenter who
specialized in this work.  You had to attach the covering planks to the
logs in such a way that you did not have bulges and curves.  Aunt Joan
(Sullivan) Richardson could remember when Aaron Miller had done the work
on her father's house, and she may have mentioned what the work was
called.  If so, it has escaped my memory.