Homesteading in Ontario
The look of the house which was to be our dwelling was novel enough to me, with my old ideas about houses still in my head.
From: 1882 C.E. To: Unknown
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Adventures in Canada; or, Life in the Woods by Cunningham Geike, 1882.
The look of the house which was to be our dwelling was novel enough to me, with my old ideas about houses still in my head. It was built a little back from the river, far enough to give room for a garden when we had time to make one; and the trees had been cut down from the water's edge to some distance behind the house, to make things a little more cheery, and also to prevent the risk of any of them falling on our establishment in a high wind. The house itself had, in fact, been built of the logs procured by felling these patriarchs of the forest, every one of which had, as usual on Canadian farms, been cut down.
My brother had left special instructions to spare some of the smaller ones, but the "chopper" had understood him exactly the wrong way, and had cut down those pointed out with especial zeal as the objects of his greatest dislike. Building the house must have been very heavy work, for it was made of great logs, the whole thickness of the trees, piled one on another, a story and a half high. The neighbors had made what they call a "bee" to help to "raise" it—that is, they had come without expecting wages, but with the understanding that each would get back from us, when he wanted it, as many days' labor as he had given. They manage a difficult business like that of getting up the outside of a log house, more easily than one would think.
First, the logs are cut into the proper lengths for the sides and the ends; then they are notched at the end to make them keep together; then an equal number are put at the four sides to be ready, and the first stage is over.
The next step is to get four laid in the proper positions on the ground, and then to get up the rest, layer by layer, on the top of each other, till the whole are in their places. It is a terrible strain on the men, for there is nothing but sheer strength to help them, except that they put poles from the top of the last log raised, to the ground, and then, with handspokes, force another up the slope to its destined position. I have known many men terribly wrenched by the handspoke of some other one slipping and letting the whole weight of one end come upon the person next him.
The logs at the front and back were all fully twenty feet long, and some of them eighteen inches thick, so that you may judge their weight. After the square frame had been thus piled up, windows and a door were cut with axes, a board at the sides of each keeping the ends of the logs in their places. You may wonder how this could be done, but backwoodsmen are so skilful with the axe that it was done very neatly.
The sashes for the windows and the planking for different parts of the house were got from a saw-mill some distance off, across the river, and my brother put in the glass. Of course there were a great many chinks between the logs, but these were filled up, as well as possible, with billets and chips of wood, the whole being finally coated and made air-tight with mortar.
Thus the logs looked as if built up with lime, the great black trunks of the trees alternating with the grey belts between. The frame of the roof was made of round poles, flattened on the top, on which boards were put, and these again were covered with shingles—a kind of wooden slate made of split pine, which answers very well. The angles at the ends were filled up with logs fitted to the length, and fixed in their places by wooden pins driven through the roof-pole at each corner. On the whole house there were no nails used at all, except on the roof. Wooden pins, and an auger to make holes, made every thing fast. Inside, it was an extraordinary place. The floor was paved with pine slabs, the outer planks cut from logs, with the round side down, and fixed by wooden pins to sleepers made of thin young trees, cut the right lengths.
Overhead, a number of similar round poles, about the thickness of a man's leg, supported the floor of the upper story, which was to be my sisters' bedroom. They had planks, however, instead of boards, in honor of their sex, perhaps. They had to climb to this paradise by an extraordinary ladder, made with the never-failing axe and auger, out of green, round wood. I used always to think of Robinson Crusoe getting into his fortification, when I saw them going up.
The chimney was a wonderful affair. It was large enough to let you walk up most of the way, and could hold, I can't tell how many logs, four or five feet long, for a fire. It was built of mud, and when whitewashed looked very well—at least we came to like it; it was so clean and cheerful in the winter time. But we had to pull it down some years after, and get one built of brick, as it was always getting out of repair. A partition was put up across the middle and then divided again, and this made two bedrooms for my brothers, and left us our solitary room, which was to serve for kitchen, dining-room, and drawing-room, the outer door opening into it. As to paint, it was out of the question, but we had lime for whitewash, and what with it and some newspapers my brothers pasted up in their bedrooms, and a few pictures we brought from home, we thought we were quite stylish. There was no house any better, at any rate, in the neighborhood, and I suppose we judged by that.
To keep out the rain and the cold—for rats were not known on the river for some years after—the whole of the bottom log outside had to be banked up after our arrival, the earth being dug up all round and thrown against it. The miserable shanties in which some settlers manage to live for a time are half burned by this process, and the very wretched ones built by laborers alongside public works while making, look more like natural mounds than human habitations. I have often thought it was a curious thing to see how people, when in the same or nearly the same circumstances, fall upon similar plans.
Some of the Indians in America, for instance, used to sink a pit for a house, and build it round with stones, putting a roof on the walls, which reached only a little above the ground; and antiquarians tell us that the early Scotch did the very same. Then Xenophon, long ago, and Curzon, in our day, tell us how they were often like to fall through the roof of the houses in Annenia into the middle of the family, huddled up, with their oxen, beneath, their dwellings being burrowed into the side of a slope, and showing no signs of their presence from above.
But our house was not like this, I am happy to say; it was on the ground, not in it, and was very warm for Canada, when the wind did not come against the door, which was a very poor one of inch-thick wood. The thickness of the logs kept out the cold wonderfully, though that is a very ambiguous word for a Canadian house, which would need to be made two logs thick to be warm without tremendous fires—at least, in the open unsheltered country. The houses made of what they call "clap-boards"—that is, of narrow boards three-quarters of an inch thick, and lathed and plastered inside—are very much colder; indeed, they are, in my opinion, awful, in any part of them where a fire is not kept up all winter.
One thing struck me very much, that locks and bolts seemed to be thought very useless things. Most of the doors had only wooden latches, made with an axe or a knife, and fastened at night by a wooden pin stuck in above the bar. We got water from the river close at hand; a plank run out into the stream forming what they called "a wharf," to let us get depth enough for our pitchers and pails.
Besides the house, my brother had got a barn built not far from the house—of course a log one—on the piece clear of trees. It was about the size of the house, but the chinks between the logs were not so carefully filled up as in it. The squirrels, indeed, soon found this out, and were constantly running in and out when we had any grain in it. The upper part was to hold our hay, and half of the ground floor was for our other crops, the cows having the remainder for their habitation.
We bought a yoke of oxen—that is, two—a few days after our arrival, and we began with two cows, one of them a pretty fair milker, but the other, which had been bought at an extra price, was chosen by Robert for its fine red skin, and never had given much milk, and never did. The oxen, great unwieldy brutes, were pretty well broken; but they were so different from any thing we had ever seen for ploughing or drawing a wagon, that we were all rather afraid of their horns at first, and not very fond of having any thing to do with them. We had bought a plough and harrows, and I don't know what else, before coming up, and had brought a great many things besides from England, so that we had a pretty fair beginning in firm implements.
An ox-wagon was very soon added to our purchases—a rough affair as could be. It was nothing but two planks for the bottom and one for each side, with short pieces at the ends, like the wagon-stage, on the road from Toronto—a long box on four wheels, about the height of a cart. The boards were quite loose, to let them rise and fall in going over the roads when they were bad. The oxen were fastened to this machine by a yoke, which is a heavy piece of hard wood, with a hollow at each end for the back of the necks of the oxen, and an iron ring in the middle, on the under side, to slip over a pin at the end of the wagon-pole, the oxen being secured to it by two thin collars of a tough wood called hickory, which were just pieces bent to fit their deep necks, the ends being pushed up through two holes in the yokes at each side, and fastened by pins at the top. There was no harness of any kind, and no reins, a long wand serving to guide them. I used at first to think it was a very brave thing to put the yoke on or take it off.
The names of our two were Elephant and Buck-eye, the one, as his name showed, a great creature, but as lazy as he was hug; the other, a much nicer beast, somewhat smaller, and a far better worker. They wore both red and white, and so patient and quiet, that I used to be ashamed of myself when I got angry at them for their solemn slowness and stupidity. Had we been judges of cattle we might have got much better ones for the money they cost us; but my brother Andrew, who bought them, had never had any more to do with oxen till then than to help to eat them at dinner. However, we never bought anything more from the man who sold us them.
Geike, Cunningham. Adventures in Canada; or, Life in the Woods, Porter & Coates, 1882.
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