Cathy and Peter Start Building Their Log  Cabin - Logs & Tools | PIONEER LIFE CIRCA1700

Welcome back to the second episode of the Woodland Escape. As we mentioned, we're going to be reproducing, we hope, as close to as it was done in the 18th century, a settler's log cabin. So we're three days in at this point. We've got some sill logs out, we've got some blocks that we're going to use for rocks. And I thought today we'd talk a little bit about the tools that they used during that time frame. Not as crude as you might think, because they were quite effective. But one tool that certainly isn't talked about, and was carried by just about everyone, certainly it was, natives used it, the French very quickly caught on to it, the voyageurs for portaging. And it's called a burden strap, or a tumpline. This one's 20 feet long. Quite annoying to make, because you start with 60 feet of material. But anyway, they didn't have tape measures, so what I've done with this particular one, and they did, was I've got marks on this, little lashings of thongs of leather. So there's an 8 foot mark, that's 10 feet, that's 14 feet. Even got a mark on here where I'm going to square the cabin up corner to corner. So quite a useful tool in the production of this cabin. So as you can see, we've started to peel the logs. Now you can't, well you can, you can build a cabin with the bark on. The issue is it'll harbor a lot of insects that eventually are going to get in underneath the bark and affect the structural integrity. So the first thing is peeling the logs. The old timers would all often say that one should never peel logs in a month that has an hour in it. So that leaves May, June, July and August. Those are the four months where logs peel relatively easy. So as you saw Kathy working on what you see in the foreground and what I'm sitting on, these will be floor joists. And the bark's quite nasty to get off at this time of year, we're just starting into October. In the spring when you started at one end, you can literally peel the bark end for end. You'll also notice that there's bits of secondary bark, the inner bark on there. We're not so concerned about that because as the log dries that's going to slough off. But we've got to get this exterior bark off, off the log. So that's the first step. So we've started to fell trees, we've got quite a few done. Over to my right, I have the purlons for the roof. Back behind my shelter, I have all the rafters sawn yet to be peeled for the roof line. We have some of the logs cut. So yeah, we've got probably about four days of cutting logs and then another four or five days of peeling, and we'll have all the raw material done. So once you have all the raw material, and that prep is out of the way, you're well on your way to building a cabin. It doesn't take a lot once all the material is on hand. So yeah, in the next video, we hope to show the sill beams in and you'll see us driving in the floor joists. They're going to be mortised in. When we get down to the floorboards, I'm going to be making my own nails in the blacksmith shop. So first I've got to make a new nail header. Old ones wore out. So you're going to see all that. We'll be making all the metal work in here, including the crane for the open hearth fireplace. We'll be making the door hinges, essentially anything steel, we'll be making in our blacksmith shop. We hope to set up a small blacksmith shop out here with a portable forge and a second anvil that I have. So instead of going back and forth to the shop, we'll be able to recreate most of the stuff right here on site. So as true to nature in terms of the time frame, in the backdrop is the primitive shelter you've seen in the previous video. Typically when settlers arrived in an area that they were going to homestead, the first thing they would do is construct a very crude structure to protect themselves from the elements. It could be as simple as what you see in the background, a three-sided, three-faced open shelter, fire outside. Often it would have been a sod hut and they would live in that while they constructed their home. So you might see a lot of me coming out of here in the morning. I hope to be sleeping back here quite a bit, trying to do it as traditionally as possible, where I'll get up and cook up my breakfast and then go out my day's work. So that pretty much covers the start of this, but we wanted to talk about tools. So we're going to step back here and I'm going to go over some of the tools that were available to the people in that time frame. In fact, if you had the tools that I'm about to show, you would consider yourself a very wealthy settler. Essentially I have all the tools that would have been used in that time period. So just before I jump into the tools that we're going to use in this construction, I thought I'd talk a bit about the design. First of all, if you see remnants of log cabins from that time period, some of them have actually even survived. Those that were well built and maintained, some of them 350 years old. They were small. They had to be small. As you saw, all the logs that we're going to bring out here were bringing out by hand. So these sill logs were quite heavy, but you can move them a foot at a time and haul them out. So contrary to popular belief, nobody had a horse or very few people had a horse. Maybe one person in a hundred had a horse or an ox. We're talking the 1700s. There were no roads. They were just dirt paths or trails. In fact, some places no trails. They would actually arrive at a homestead by a raft along one of the major rivers. So first of all, the design had to be small in size so it was manageable for a family. Your neighbors might be 25 or 50 miles away. So there wasn't help. The other thing in that time period and well into the 1800s, the chimney was always on the outside of the cabin. There were three reasons for that. First, it was the architectural style of the time period. So 1700s, well into the 1800s, it was just what people liked to see. But the primary reason was that the people in the 18th and 19th, 17th, 18th and 19th century lived in fear of fire. First of all, they had fire going all day, every day, except maybe in the heat of summer. And even then, if they needed to heat something, they would have to light fire. Now, sometimes they'd have a small outdoor kitchen, but for the most part, the hearth always had a fire going in it. Obviously, there was no fire departments and no one had homeowners insurance. So if it burnt down, you had to reconstruct it. So they always lived in fear of fire. So the fireplaces themselves were dry laid and an art in itself. So they were open hearth. About a foot of the fireplace would extend inside the cabin where I'm sitting and three to four feet of it would extend outside the cabin. The reason they were dry laid was if in the event of a fire, they could actually go outside, throw a rope on it with the family, maybe one person could pull the chimney away from the house. It would explode into remnants of sparks and fires all over the backyard from creosote. So it was a way to ensure that they had some kind of a safety check in the event of fire. There are accounts, actually first person accounts of people approaching cabins where the fire was going inside and they could actually see the flames through the cracks in the rocks. So I'm breaking a little bit from tradition here because I plan on using this cabin when it's finished. I plan on having family and friends use it. And obviously, I don't live in the 18th century. So I want to ensure it's safe. So we're going to be using, you can see here, I've got a, I hope you can see in the frame. We've poured a footer, a cement footer. We did it by hand though. And we'll be using a mortar for the brick, for the stone layout. We'll be gathering field stone just as they would have. And yeah, we'll be using a clay flue on the inside of the chimney. So just a little break from tradition. It's going to look identical. It's going to function identical. It'll have a crane in it for cooking, a mantel. And when it's all said and done, I'll have my favorite flintlock fowler hanging above the mantel piece. Anyway, I'll talk a bit about tools now. So talk about, essentially, this arsenal of tools covers the gamut of tools they had available at the time. The most essential is that, the axe. Now one could build a cabin complete, start to finish with nothing but that tool. But it would be a crude thing indeed. So for felling the trees, you're notching the trees with an axe. That axe is going to have lots of other uses, but essentially you're putting the notch in the tree when you're trying to directionally fell the actual bowl or trunk of the tree. Next thing was a buck saw. And this is pretty typical of the time frame. And actually still functions quite well. We just put a little rub on that. It works quite well. That would make the back cut in the log in order to fell the tree. So once the tree is on the ground and brought up, you saw this the draw knife in action when Kathy was pulling out the bark off the floor joists. So once that's done, we're going to level it. So you basically site the log. You could draw a line on it, but often they just did it by eye. There's an old saying that no measurement supersedes a fair line. And if you can employ your eye, you can pretty get things pretty level. So basically using the axe at that point, you go along and about every four five inches, you would put a V notch in the log. I'll be demonstrating these later. I just wanted to cover the tools. Put a whole series of these along. Once you have those V notches put in the log, you're going to use a wonderful tool called an adze. An adze is razor sharp. You're going to straddle the log. Some people stood on it. And basically between those notches, you're going to cut out that excess wood until you end up with a flat surface. Now when you're done, if you're looking for a finished thing, let's say you're trying to make furniture. This is a broad axe and you notice it's totally flat on one side and it's beveled on this side, the same as you'd find a chisel. It only cuts on one side. Now this broke the handle on this, so I've got to go off to the bush and get some hickory or ash and make a handle. And the handle has to be offset. So this is called a finishing hatchet. So this was the fine working tool of the time frame. It would be used primarily for furniture. Sometimes broad axes were so heavy a man could hardly lift them. They might have a 10 or a 12 inch blade on them. But this one works pretty good for the size of logs we're using. So the handle's offset so that you can work your way down the log, finishing it off without smashing your knuckles. So we've got to make a new handle for that. The next most common thing was a chisel. And if you look at surviving tools from that time period, the two inch wide one was the most common. So you could do reasonably fine work with that, but also big enough and meaty enough to take off a lot of material at once. Some form of a mallet. Now this one's made some material trimmed out, but often it would just be a big old burl in the trunk of a tree. Something was really hard and gnarly to use to tap the material out. So for real fine finished work, let's say that dining room table, you would be finishing with mallet and chisel. And at the end you might be working that wood like that. If you look at the furniture that was available in that time period, it was almost for the common person. White pine was very commonly used. And one thing, it looked pretty when it was done and oiled or often they used milk paint or different surface material to cover it. But that furniture was saw wood itself was easy to work. And they had the tools that they could work at hand planes, chisels, pine work quite easily. Hardwood like walnuts and cherries and maples and oaks was extremely hard. And aristocratic people might have had it, but often it would have been imported from Europe into the bigger cities, certainly not on the frontier. So that covers that. They would had an assortment of augers, different sizes. So in the assembly of this cabin, anytime we actually have to fix a joint, I'll use an example of the door sills or the window sills, we're going to auger a hole through those. Then we're going to whittle out a square, slightly square to roundish peg. And we're literally going to drive it into that hole to hold that membrane. That'll get sawn off after clean and the door installed. That would be an example of making furniture quite a surface in that quite handy for cleaning out the notches. So the notches in this cabin are going to be round or saddle notches. The simplest, probably one of the oldest. There'll be no nails or screws holding this. Basically, they lock themselves together. So as you go alternate rows of logs as the pen, we call it the pen of the house or the walls is going up basically a structure, doors and windows will be cut out after. So there's no nails required because once you put a log the opposite direction, it holds it from going in or out and then you reverse that on the next log. So that sort of covers the tools. You've seen the layout, you've seen our design, and in the future you're going to see a whole lot more videos as the cabin goes up. So here we have a fine example of a white pine, just about the right size, still manageable. There are a lot bigger ones certainly but we got to be careful what we bite off and this is about maximum but it will make really good boards. Now the boards once sawn were used for both the flooring and sheathing of the roof and then after that cedar shapes were used. I didn't mention it but the construction of our cabin itself is going to be made completely from cedar. It's soft, it's easy to work, it's reasonably light but the flooring, we're going to take this into a mill and have it sawn, rough sawn, similar to what they would have had. So they had whip saws where they would build essentially a scaffolding and then they'd have a pit and at each end of this long, if you think of a cross-cut saw with a vertical handle, they had horizontal handles. So there'd be a guy up on top of the scaffolding and the guy down in the pit and I'm thinking that he, I don't know, he was the apprentice or he drew the short straw but he was down in the bottom and they'd saw like this. He would pull down, the guy up on top would pull up and they would literally saw planks. There were guides to give them thickness capability so they could saw one inch, two inch, four inch. So this this power saw, if you were near a community where they'd harnessed water, one of the first things they built would have been a grist mill followed very very closely by a sawmill. So the reciprocating saw that worked with power water was very common in bigger communities as they grew and developed into the late 1700s, early 1800s. The saw itself, interestingly enough, the powered water, water powered reciprocating saw actually dates back to 3 AD to the Romans. It developed over parts of Asia very quickly but it wasn't until about the 11th century after the dark ages that it actually took off in Europe, ultimately making its way to North America and used by the colonists as they built their communities. So this is a, this tree and about two or three more will supply all the flooring we need on all the roofing and as I mentioned I've got a lot of nails that I've got to pound out to make this authentic. Thank you for visiting.