TEACHER'S GUIDE TO
History and Folklife of the Kentucky Frontier
Lesson 5: Reminiscence of log cabin
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Emigrants to Kentucky in the late 18th and early 19th centuries brought with them a tradition of log architecture that had developed in Pennsylvania. Wood was abundant; a French botanist who visited Kentucky in 1802 recorded at least 140 species of trees that attained a height of 30 feet, adding that trees with a six or seven foot diameter were not uncommon. Most of the homes built in the frontier period no longer survive. Those that do survive give very few clues as to how furniture was arranged and how people used the inside of the house. Written records such as this one can be extremely helpful in understanding the everyday environment. |
Our cabin was twenty-four by eighteen. The west end was occupied by two beds, the centre of each side by a door, and here our symmetry had to stop, for on the side opposite the window, made of clapboards, supported on pins driven into the logs, were our shelves. Upon these shelves my sister displayed, in ample order, a host of pewter plates, basins, and dishes, and spoons, scoured and bright. It was non of your new-fangled pewter made of lead, but the best London pewter, which our father himself bought of Townsend, the manufacturer. These were the plates upon which you could hold your meat so as to cut it without slipping and without dulling your knife. But alas! the days of pewter plates and sharp dinner knives have passed away never to return. To return to our internal arrangements. A ladder of five rounds occupied the corner near the window. By this, when we got a floor above, we could ascend. Our chimney occupied most of the east end; pots and kettles opposite the window under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four split-bottom chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight by ten looking glass sloped from the wall over a large towell and combcase. These, with a clumsy shovel and a pair of tongs, made in Frederick, with one shank straight, as the best manufacture of pinches and blood blisters, completed our furniture, except a spinning wheel and such things were necessary to work with. It was absolutely necessary to have three-legged stools, as four legs of anything could not all touch the floor at the same time....We got our chimney up breast high as soon as we could, and got our cabin daubed as high as the joists outside. It never was daubed on the inside, for my sister, who was very nice, could not consent to "live right next to the mud." My impression now is, that the window was not constructed till spring, for until the sticks and clay was put on the chimney we could possibly have no need of a window; for the flood light which always poured into the cabin from the fireplace would have extinguished our paper window, and rendered it as useless as the moon at noonday.
from American Pioneer, October 1832. Quoted in Thomas D. Clark, Frontier America
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959).
Using the dimensions and description given in the excerpt
1. Draw the inside of the house.
2. Draw to scale the floor plan of the cabin.
3. Have students figure the square footage of the cabin and compare it to the size of their own homes.4. Have students draw the floor plan of their own home and label each space. Discuss how a one-room cabin might be divided into sleeping, cooking, eating, and working areas through the furniture arrangement.5. Using chairs or other easily moved items, measure and enclose an 18'x24' area and move desks into the spaces where furniture would be. Have about 8 students pretend to be an average-sized family doing a variety of tasks in the evening. Discuss the differences between 18th century and 21st century ideas of privacy and space.6. Discuss the value of architecture as historical information. What can it reveal or not reveal about the people who made it?
This lesson was adapted by Jennifer Small from A Teacher's Guide to Pioneer Life in South Central Kentucky, by Nancy Disher Baird and Carol Crowe-Carraco.