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By Root 2194 0

commodities was limestone, as the first colonists discovered to their dismay. In England, you could build a reasonably secure house with wattle and daub—essentially a framework of mud and sticks—if it was sufficiently bound with lime. But in America there was no lime (or at least none found before 1690), so the colonists used dried mud, which proved to be woefully lacking in sturdiness. During the first century of colonization, it was a rare house that lasted more than ten years. This was the period of the Little Ice Age, when a century or so of bitterly cold winters and howling storms battered the temperate world. A hurricane in 1634 blew away—literally just lifted up and carried off—half the houses of Massachusetts. Barely had people rebuilt when a second storm of similar intensity blew in, “overturning sundry howses, uncovering [i.e., unroofing] diverse others,” in the words of one diarist who lived through it. Even decent building stone was not available in many areas. When George Washington wanted to pave his loggia at Mount Vernon with simple flagstones, he had to send to England for them.

The one thing America had in quantity was wood. When Europeans arrived, the New World was a continent containing an estimated 950 million acres of woodland—enough to seem effectively infinite. But in fact the woods were not quite as boundless as they first appeared, particularly as the newcomers moved inland. Beyond the mountains of the eastern seaboard, Indians had already cleared large expanses and burned much of the forest undergrowth to make hunting easier. In Ohio, early settlers were astonished to find that the woods were more like English parks than primeval forests, and roomy enough to allow the driving of carriages through the trees. Indians created these parks for the benefit of bison, which they effectively harvested.

The colonists positively devoured wood. They used it to build houses, barns, wagons, boats, fences, furniture, and every possible sort of daily utensil from buckets to spoons. They burned it in copious amounts for warmth and for cooking. According to the historian of early American life Carl Bridenbaugh, the average colonial house required fifteen to twenty cords of firewood a year, enough to deplete local supplies quickly in most places. Bridenbaugh mentions one village on Long Island where every stick of wood to every horizon was exhausted in just fourteen years, and there must have been many others like it.

Huge additional acreages were cleared for fields and pastures, and even roadways resulted in literally widespread clearances. Highways in colonial America tended to be inordinately wide—165 feet across was not unusual—to provide safety from ambush and room to drive and graze herds of animals en route to market. By 1810, barely a quarter of Connecticut’s original woods remained. Farther west, Michigan’s seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century. Much American wood was exported to Europe, particularly in the form of shingles and weatherboards.* As Jane Jacobs notes in The Economy of Cities, a lot of American wood fueled the Great Fire of London.

One common assumption is that the early settlers built log cabins. They didn’t. They didn’t know how. Log cabins were introduced by Scandinavian immigrants in the late eighteenth century, at which point they did rapidly catch on. Although log cabins were comparatively straightforward productions—that was of course their appeal—there was some complexity to them, too. Where the logs locked in place at the corners, the builders could use any of several types of notches—V notch, saddle notch, diamond notch, square notch, full dovetail, half dovetail, and so on—and these, it turns out, had curiously particular geographical affinities that no one has ever been able to entirely explain. Saddle notching, for instance, was the preferred method in the Deep South, central Wisconsin, and southern Michigan but was found almost nowhere else. Residents of New York State,