Keeping Warm, by Evan Si

While reading about the creation of new colonies in the textbook, it read as if settlements magically appeared. People would seemingly travel places and magically whip together a colony after a few people die to disease.

In reality, things weren't always so simple. These settlers were landing on an unforgiving wilderness armed with virtually nothing, and had to build a home. From a modern day perspective, it was sort of like Castaway or a real-life Minecraft.
Finding the necessary materials to create a house wasn't easy, let alone creating the house to begin with. The most common form of housing was the timber-frame home, created with "a form of carpentry which [involved] taking large pieces of wood and joining them together with woodworking joints, using mortise-and-tenon construction, without metal construction such as nails. Wooden pegs, bents, braces, and sometimes trusses [were] employed." An example of such a home would be a saltbox home. In general colloquial settings, these are largely just called "log cabins."

But if these homes existed today, home inspectors would say there is absolutely no insulation. The only real insulation was clapboard and some plaster walls. As a result, the homes were frigid, to the point that Thomas Jefferson once complained in a letter that "the ink freezes in my pen." Water in the household regularly froze over, with inefficient fireplaces and cast iron stoves being the only remedy to the cold.

Today, plenty of people still complain about cold weather, but conditions are far better today than they were in colonial times. With technology playing such a major role in today's society, it is often difficult to connect with seventeenth and eighteenth century colonists. Is the individualistic level of hardships and death overlooked in the context of the present, or is it addressed appropriately? Why?


An example of a timber-frame home.