FIGURE 24. THE JOHN KNOX CABIN.
That such cabins were indeed of a better class becomes painfully clear when Olmsted adds a note about the cabins of poorer people. These cabins were “mere pens of logs, roofed over, provided with a chimney, and usually with a shed of boards, supported by rough posts before the door.”
FIGURE 25. 17TH CENTURY FRAMED HOUSES.
WOODEN FRAME HOUSES
Houses with wooden frames or skeletons were built in North Carolina long before the log houses seen above. Framed houses represent a tradition of building dating from medieval times which the colonists brought from Europe.
The earliest framed houses in the South have disappeared almost without a trace, but scholars are able to form general ideas about their nature. For example, [figure 25], showing several kinds of framed houses, is from Henry Formans’ book, Architecture in the Old South. The drawing depicts the kind of wall surfaces which might possibly have been seen in Jamestown, Virginia, very early in the 17th century. All the houses are of wooden frame construction, either exposed or covered. Houses with framework exposed are called “half-timbered.” From left to right in the drawing the houses are described as follows:—half-timber work with brick filling; plaster; weatherboarding or clapboards; half-timber work with plaster; and tile-hung. Several of the houses have a projecting second story. All have steep roofs. Windows are of the hinged casement type, with small pieces of diagonally set glass.
Houses of this general sort—especially those with exposed wooden frame and projecting second story—are frequently shown in illustrations in European history books. In England they are called Jacobean, because of their association with the Jacobean period in 17th-century England which followed the Tudor era.
