Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typ...os. Excerpt from book: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY PRIMITIVE SHELTERS IN all the European settlements in North America, more primitive shelters? the very types of which have long since been swept away?preceded dwellings of frame or of masonry, and continued for a greater or less time to subsist beside them. It is currently supposed that this was uniquely the result of pioneer conditions in a new world, forcing the adoption of existing native types or the spontaneous creation of others adapted to the environment. It has also been generally assumed, even by careful students, that the first houses of the colonists were log houses of the general scheme of the "log cabins" of later frontier settlements, built of logs laid horizontally and chinked with clay. An attentive study of the documents regarding the earliest dwellings in the colonies and of the ordinary houses of England at the same period leads us, however, to very different conclusions. The earliest records of the English colonies nowhere indicate the use of the construction just described, although they reveal the employment of many other primitive modes of building. These, it appears, represent neither invention of necessity nor borrowing from the Indians, but transplantation and perpetuation of types current in England, still characteristic then of the great body of minor dwellings in the country districts. It is little realized that few of the old cottages now standing in England antedate the seventeenth century, and that they represent a general rise in the "culture stage" of the English yeomanry which took place at that time, bringing to them, as of right, things which had before appertained only to the gentry, and involving the destruction and replacement of the cruder dwellings which had been usual hitherto.1 In his recent and fundam...Detailed info »« Brief info