The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [24]
Our first chapter ended with a leaving; this one ends with a coming—appropriately in the early spring. The Swains’ house is finished in a fortnight, and they can turn their attention to the land: pulling the stumps of the oaks they have cut and plowing the earth and planting it. I think of the smiling faces of the children, and Lizzie pleased with her new home, and the smell of fresh-plowed earth, and the opening of dogwood and redbud blossom, and then somehow the thought of all the pests and plagues and vermin is endurable.
Weeks and weeks were to pass before, one day, Sarah Swain, the oldest girl, past twenty, hair dark as pitch, would show up at the door of Jacob’s cabin with a piece of freshbaked cornbread, which she would offer into his astonished hands.
Chapter three
At first glance it seems similar to the Ingledew cabin, but in the Ozarks, unlike other areas of the country where prepackaged houses come monotonously identical, there were no two dwellings exactly alike. We are impressed with the two most conspicuous differences: the Swain house has a porch, and its timbers are hewed rather than left round. There are other differences, subtle to notice or not visible in our illustration: a puncheon floor inside, whereas the Ingledew cabin had no floor but earth. (Puncheons are simply split logs with their flat side up, very sturdy, and over the years worn smooth and shiny by the bare feet of many children.) The Swain chimney is slightly taller than the Ingledew chimney, reducing the hazard of igniting the roof. The gable ends are shingled in the Swain house, rather fancifully, and the roof covering is true riven shingles, not boards. The chinking in the interstices between the timbers is not simply mud but more durable clay, finished off with a layer of white lime plaster. There is, as it were, a second story, which was the sleeping quarters for the seven Swain boys: a loft under the gables, reached by a ladder through a scuttle-hole. And there is a window! If we look carefully we can find it, just to the side of the chimney. Glass being unavailable, the window was “glazed” with a bobcat skin, boiled in lye and scraped and oiled, nailed over it. The bobcat skin was translucent but not transparent, letting in light but no prying eyes.
Notice that the corners, the ends of the logs, are not saddle-notched but dovetailed. This makes for a tighter fit and a more sturdy building. The hardest job in building this cabin, which fell exclusively to Jacob Ingledew and the older Swain boy, Murray, was the hewing of these logs. A chalk line was stretched the length of the log and snapped, marking it along the rounded edge; then a chopping axe was sunk into this line at intervals, and then a broadaxe (with curved handle so as to avoid hitting one’s ankles) was used to hack off the rounded sides of the log. It was painstaking, grueling work—and Murray Swain, as we shall see, came down with the frakes at the end of it. But the result of this work was a house that not only looks much more “modern” than the Ingledew cabin, but is also more durable. The Swain house is the first dwelling in our study which still exists today, although, being unoccupied, its porch has collapsed and most of the shingles have blown off the roof and it is used only by young boys looking for a place to sneak a smoke or older boys with their girls looking for a place to sneak a joy. Until about twenty-five years ago, however, it had been lived in continuously by five generations of Swains.
The similarities between the Swain house and the Ingledew cabin are apparent: both have only one door and both are roughly sixteen feet (or one hat) square. The architect of the Swain house is not easy to establish; the similarities between it and the Ingledew