At Home

by Bill Bryson

  * Mercury especially so. It has been estimated that as little as 1/25 of a teaspoon of mercury could poison a sixty-acre lake. It is fairly amazing that we don’t get poisoned more often. According to one computation, no fewer than twenty thousand chemicals in common use are poisonous to humans if “touched, ingested or inhaled.” Most are twentieth-century creations.

  * Sodium chloride is strange stuff because it is made up of two extremely aggressive elements: sodium and chlorine. Sodium and chlorine are the Hell’s Angels of the mineral kingdom. Drop a lump of pure sodium into a bucket of water and it will explode with enough force to kill. Chlorine is even more deadly. It was the active ingredient in the poison gases of the First World War and, as swimmers know, even in very dilute form it makes the eyes sting. Yet put these two aggressive elements together, and what you get is innocuous sodium chloride—common table salt.

  * The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, seed, fruit, or other nonleafy part.

  * Nutmeg is the seed of the tree; mace is part of the flesh that surrounds the seed. Mace was actually the rarer of the two. About a thousand tons of nutmeg were harvested annually, but only about a hundred tons of mace.

  * Amerindians got syphilis, too, but suffered less from it, in much the way that Europeans suffered less from measles and mumps.

  • CHAPTER IX •

  THE CELLAR

  I

  If you had suggested to anyone in 1783, at the end of the American War of Independence, that New York would one day be the greatest city in the world, you would possibly have been marked out as a fool. New York’s prospects in 1783 were not promising. It had housed more Loyalists than any other city, so the war had had an unhappy effect on its standing within the new republic. In 1790, its population was just ten thousand. Philadelphia, Boston, and even Charleston were all busier ports.

  The state of New York had just one important advantage—an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and were such an obstruction to trade and communications that many people believed that the pioneers living beyond the mountains would eventually, of practical necessity, form a separate nation. For farmers it was cheaper to ship their produce downriver to New Orleans, via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, then by sea around Florida and up the Atlantic seaboard to Charleston or one of the other eastern ports—a distance of three thousand miles or more—than it was to haul it three hundred miles overland across the mountains.

  But in 1810, DeWitt Clinton, then mayor of New York City and soon to become governor of the state, produced an idea that many thought was possibly mad but certainly delusional. He proposed building a canal across the state to Lake Erie, connecting New York City with the Great Lakes and the rich farmlands beyond. People called it Clinton’s Folly, and not surprisingly. The canal would have to be dug with picks and shovels, to a width of forty feet, through 363 miles of rough wilderness. It would need eighty-three locks, each ninety feet long, to manage all the changes of elevation. Along some stretches the slope would have to average no more than one inch per mile. No canal of even close to this degree of challenge had ever been attempted anywhere in the settled world, much less in a wilderness.

  And here was the thing. America didn’t have a single native-born engineer who had ever worked on a canal. Thomas Jefferson, who normally venerated ambition, thought the whole idea insane. “It is a splendid project, and may be executed a century hence,” he allowed after reviewing the plans, but added at once: “It is little short of madness to think of it at this day.” President James Madison refused to give federal aid, at least partly motivated by a desire to keep the center of commercial gravity farther south and away from that old Loyalist stronghold.

  So New York’s options were to go alone or go without. Despite the costs, risks, and almost total absence of necessary skills, it decided to fund the project itself. Four men—Charles Broadhead, James Geddes, Nathan Roberts, and Benjamin Wright—were appointed to get the work done. Three of them were judges; the fourth was a schoolteacher. None had ever even seen a canal, much less tried to build one. All they had in common was some experience of surveying. Yet somehow through reading, consultation, and inspired experimentation, they managed to design and supervise the greatest engineering project the New World had ever seen. They became the first people in history to learn how to build a canal by building a canal.

  Early on, it became apparent that one problem threatened the viability of the whole enterprise—a lack of hydraulic cement. Half a million bushels of hydraulic cement (a bushel is thirty-two U.S. quarts or about thirty-five liters, so half a million bushels is a lot) were needed to make the canal watertight. If water seeped away on any section, it would be a disaster for the whole canal, so clearly it was a problem that had to be fixed. Unfortunately, no one knew how to overcome it.

  A young canal employee named Canvass White volunteered to travel to England at his own expense to see what he could learn. For nearly a year White walked the length and breadth of Britain—two thousand miles in all—studying canals and learning all he could about how they were built and kept together, with a particular eye on waterproofing. By chance, it turned out that Parker’s Roman cement—which, as we have seen, played a central role in the downfall of William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey because of its lack of strength as a building material—worked unexpectedly well as a hydraulic cement, where it needed only to be used as a water-resistant mortar. Its inventor, the Reverend Mr. Parker of Gravesend, didn’t grow rich from this, unfortunately, as he sold his patent within a year of taking it out, and then, rather ironically, emigrated to America, where he soon died. His cement, however, did very well till it was superseded by superior varieties in the 1820s, and gave Canvass White hope to suppose that he might come up with something similar using American materials.

  Returning home, and now armed with some knowledge of the scientific principles of adhesion, White experimented with various native ingredients and quickly formulated a compound that worked even better than Parker’s Roman cement. It was a great moment in American technological history—indeed, it could be said to be the beginning of American technological history—and it deserved to make White rich and celebrated. In fact, it did neither. White’s patents entitled him to a royalty of four cents on each bushel sold—a small enough sum as it was—but the manufacturers declined to share their profits. He pressed his claims through the courts but was unable to enforce any judgments that went his way. The result was a long slide into penury.

  The manufacturers, meantime, grew rich making what was now the best hydraulic cement in the world. Thanks in large part to White’s invention, the canal opened early, in 1825, after just eight years of construction. It was a triumph from the start. So many boats used it—thirteen thousand in the first year—that at night their running lights looked like swarms of fireflies on the water, according to one captivated witness. With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one. The effect on New York’s fortunes was breathtaking. Its share of national exports leaped from less than 10 percent in 1800 to over 60 percent by the middle of the century; in the same period, even more dazzlingly, its population went from ten thousand to well over half a million.

  Probably no manufactured product in history—certainly none of greater obscurity—has done more to change a city’s fortunes than Canvass White’s hydraulic cement. The Erie Canal secured the economic primacy not only of New York within the United States but also, very possibly, of the United States within the world. Without the Erie Canal, Canada would have been id
eally positioned to become the powerhouse of North America, with the St. Lawrence River serving as the conduit to the Great Lakes and the rich lands beyond.

  So the great unsung Canvass White didn’t just make New York rich; more profoundly, he helped make America. In 1834, exhausted by his legal battles and suffering from some serious but unspecified malady—probably consumption—he traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, in the hope of restoring his health; unfortunately, he died there soon after arriving. He was already forgotten by history and so poor that his wife could barely afford to bury him. And that is probably the last time you will ever hear his name.

  I mention all this here because we have descended to the cellar, an unfinished and basic space in the Old Rectory, as in most English houses of the period. Originally, the cellar served primarily as a coal store. Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment, and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years. It isn’t a very congenial space, but it does have the compensating virtue of providing some sense of the superstructure of the house—the things that hold it up and keep it together, which is the subject of this chapter. The reason I have prefaced it all with the story of the Erie Canal is to make the point that building materials are more important and even, dare I say, interesting than you might think. They certainly help make history in ways that don’t often get mentioned in books.

  Indeed, the history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials. For a country famed for being rich in natural resources, America along the eastern seaboard proved to be appallingly deficient in many basic commodities necessary to an independent civilization. One of those commodities was limestone, as the first colonists discovered to their dismay. In England, you could build a reasonably secure house with wattle and daub—essentially a framework of mud and sticks—if it was sufficiently bound with lime. But in America there was no lime (or at least none found before 1690), so the colonists used dried mud, which proved to be woefully lacking in sturdiness. During the first century of colonization, it was a rare house that lasted more than ten years. This was the period of the Little Ice Age, when a century or so of bitterly cold winters and howling storms battered the temperate world. A hurricane in 1634 blew away—literally just lifted up and carried off—half the houses of Massachusetts. Barely had people rebuilt when a second storm of similar intensity blew in, “overturning sundry howses, uncovering [i.e., unroofing] diverse others,” in the words of one diarist who lived through it. Even decent building stone was not available in many areas. When George Washington wanted to pave his loggia at Mount Vernon with simple flagstones, he had to send to England for them.

  The one thing America had in quantity was wood. When Europeans arrived, the New World was a continent containing an estimated 950 million acres of woodland—enough to seem effectively infinite. But in fact the woods were not quite as boundless as they first appeared, particularly as the newcomers moved inland. Beyond the mountains of the eastern seaboard, Indians had already cleared large expanses and burned much of the forest undergrowth to make hunting easier. In Ohio, early settlers were astonished to find that the woods were more like English parks than primeval forests, and roomy enough to allow the driving of carriages through the trees. Indians created these parks for the benefit of bison, which they effectively harvested.

  The colonists positively devoured wood. They used it to build houses, barns, wagons, boats, fences, furniture, and every possible sort of daily utensil from buckets to spoons. They burned it in copious amounts for warmth and for cooking. According to the historian of early American life Carl Bridenbaugh, the average colonial house required fifteen to twenty cords of firewood a year, enough to deplete local supplies quickly in most places. Bridenbaugh mentions one village on Long Island where every stick of wood to every horizon was exhausted in just fourteen years, and there must have been many others like it.

  Huge additional acreages were cleared for fields and pastures, and even roadways resulted in literally widespread clearances. Highways in colonial America tended to be inordinately wide—165 feet across was not unusual—to provide safety from ambush and room to drive and graze herds of animals en route to market. By 1810, barely a quarter of Connecticut’s original woods remained. Farther west, Michigan’s seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century. Much American wood was exported to Europe, particularly in the form of shingles and weatherboards.* As Jane Jacobs notes in The Economy of Cities, a lot of American wood fueled the Great Fire of London.

  One common assumption is that the early settlers built log cabins. They didn’t. They didn’t know how. Log cabins were introduced by Scandinavian immigrants in the late eighteenth century, at which point they did rapidly catch on. Although log cabins were comparatively straightforward productions—that was of course their appeal—there was some complexity to them, too. Where the logs locked in place at the corners, the builders could use any of several types of notches—V notch, saddle notch, diamond notch, square notch, full dovetail, half dovetail, and so on—and these, it turns out, had curiously particular geographical affinities that no one has ever been able to entirely explain. Saddle notching, for instance, was the preferred method in the Deep South, central Wisconsin, and southern Michigan but was found almost nowhere else. Residents of New York State, meanwhile, overwhelmingly went for a method of notching called false corner-timbering, but they abandoned that style almost completely when they moved on. A history of American migration can be plotted—in fact has been plotted—by working out which notches appeared where, and whole careers have been spent trying to account for the different distribution patterns.

  When you consider how quickly the American colonists scythed their way through the towering forests that greeted them upon arrival, it is hardly surprising that a shortage of timber was a chronic and worrisome problem in the much more confined and crowded landscape of England. Legend and fairy tales may have left us with an ineradicable popular image of medieval England being a land of dark and brooding forests, but in fact there weren’t many trees for the likes of Robin Hood and his merry men to hide behind. As long ago as 1086, at the time of the Domesday Book, just 15 percent of the English countryside was wooded.

  Throughout history Britons have used and needed a lot of wood. A typical farmhouse of the fifteenth century contained the wood of 330 oak trees. Ships used even more. Nelson’s flagship, Victory, consumed probably three thousand mature oaks—the equivalent of a good-sized woodland. Oak was also used in large quantities in industrial processes. Oak bark, mixed with dog feces, was used in the tanning of leather. Ink was made from oak galls, a kind of flesh wound in trees created by a parasitic wasp. But the real consumer of wood was the charcoal industry. By the time of Henry VIII, producing sufficient charcoal for the iron industry required nearly 200 square miles of forest annually, and by the late eighteenth century that figure had grown to 540 square miles a year, or about one-seventh of the total woodland in the country.

  Most woodlands were managed through coppicing—cutting them back, then letting them grow out again—so it wasn’t as if great swaths were being clear-felled every year. In fact, the charcoal industry, far from being a culprit, was responsible for a great deal of woodland maintenance—though what it preserved, it must be said, tended to be characterless, small-rise woods rather than mighty sun-pierced stands of forest primeval. Even with careful management, the demand for wood was so relentlessly upward that by the 1500s Britain was using timber faster than it could replenish it, and by 1600 wood for building was in desperately short supply. The half-timbered houses that we associate with this period in England are a reflection not of an abundance of timber, but a paucity of it. They were the owners’ way of s
howing that they could afford a scarce resource.

  Only necessity finally made people turn to stone. England had the most wonderful building stone in the world, but the English took forever to discover it. For nearly a thousand years, from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the age of Chaucer, wood was the almost invariable building material of England. Only the most important buildings—cathedrals, palaces, castles, churches—were accorded stone. When the Normans came to England, there wasn’t a single stone house in the country. This was slightly remarkable, because just underneath nearly everyone’s feet was sublime building stone thanks to the existence of a great belt of hard-wearing oolitic limestones (that is, ones containing lots of spherical ooliths, or grains), running in a broad arc across the body of the country, from Dorset on the south coast to the Cleveland Hills of Yorkshire in the north. This is known as the Jurassic belt, and all the most famous building stones of England, from Purbeck marble and the white stone of Portland to the honeyed blocks of Bath and the Cotswolds, are found within its sweep. These immensely ancient stones, squeezed out of prehistoric seas, are what give so much of the British landscape its soft and timeless feel. In fact, timelessness with respect to English buildings is a distinct illusion.

  The reason stone wasn’t used more was that it was expensive—expensive to extract because of the labor involved, and expensive to move because of its enormous weight. Hauling a cartload of stone ten or twelve miles could easily double its cost, so medieval stone didn’t travel far, which is why there are such appealing and specific regional differences of stone use and architectural style throughout Britain. A good-sized stone building—a Cistercian monastery, say—might require forty thousand cartloads of stone to build. A stone building was awesome not just because it was massive but because it was massively stony. The stone itself was a statement of power, wealth, and splendor.