The Kitchen
“At the last,” Moot remembered, “they had an electric stove, but when I was a boy they had one of them big wood ranges, and that thing was enormous. It had [warming closets] on top of it and all that. They’d put biscuits up there at breakfast and they’d still be warm at dinnertime. That’s the reason I stayed over there the biggest part of the time! The oven never got cool. There was thirteen of them, you know, and something had to be cooking almost all the time, so that stove hardly ever went out. The bread and potatoes and stuff was always hot. Had a stool I climbed up on and pulled them doors open up top on that old stove. Pshaw, every kid in this country was over there eating!
PLATE 387 This buffet was in the dining room…
PLATE 388 … as was this kerosene chandelier which hung …
PLATE 389 … over this table.
“And that stove had a hundred-gallon tank on the back of it and they kept hot water in it all the time. When we wanted to wash our feet, we’d go and turn that faucet on that tank and get us a tub of warm water.
“There was a big round table setting in the middle, and there was a cupboard about eight feet high, and they had a washing basin and table with water buckets and all setting on that thing. They never did get no running water at all. There never was none put in. To wash dishes, they had a big old thing that sat right to the left of the washstand like a sink, and they had a hollow bamboo cane going out from that. Didn’t have no plastic pipe. They’d fill that sink with water from the stove to wash dishes, and then when they was done, they’d just let the water run off down the hill out of that bamboo pipe.”
The Cellar
There was a full cellar big enough to stand upright in beneath rooms D and E. Moot recalled, “There was a big cellar there where they cut the meat and washed clothes and made hominy and everything. They’d build a fire under there right on the ground as big as a bonfire. Had a thing made out of rocks around it so the fire wouldn’t get out. And they had an iron thing that a sixty-gallon pot sat on. Toted the water down there from the well. That’s what they washed the clothes in and made hominy in. There was a clay pipe that run out of the side of the house to get the smoke out. They cooked lard down and everything under there, too. I used to go down there and watch them make cracklin’s. That was a big place down under there at one time.
“They had about twenty-three hollow sections of chestnut log in there, too, to store meat in. They cured the meat first on big boards in the smokehouse. Then they’d take the side meat and slice it up into bacon and pack it into them logs after it was sliced up. Those were hollow on the inside, see, and they had them things full of meat.”
PLATE 390 This washstand and the pitcher and basin were in the kitchen. The clock was on the mantel in the teachers’ room.
Mitch remembered that they also had holes dug in the ground where they kept their sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes covered up through the winter.
Canned goods that were not stored in the cellar were kept in a pantry built under the stairway that went from the first to the second floor of the house.
Inevitably, members of the family died or moved away, one by one. Toward the end, only Keith and Amanda were left. Then, as Moot related, “After Keith died, Mandy stayed there by herself. I went over there and slept a lot of times at night. She closed part of the house off and stayed in the rest. That was home, and she wasn’t gonna leave it. [After she died, the family decided] they’d let it fall in rather than let anybody rent it. Renters would have started taking the stuff out, one piece at a time. One’d get this and one’d get that till it would all be gone.”
Mitch added, “Even at the end, Amanda hauled her water from the well. She had an electric stove and refrigerator, but the house never was plumbed. Tough life. She thought the world of that place. Yes, sir. You’d say something about her moving somewhere? She’d say, ‘Aw, my furniture wouldn’t fit there!’ I offered to buy her a place out there on Prathers Bridge Road—nice little house out there for sale for $5,000. I mentioned it to her. Made her as mad as the very dickens!”
PLATE 391 This hollow section of a chestnut log, now filled with dirt and used as a planter, used to stand in the cellar and hold salt-cured bacon.
PLATE 392 The Rothell house as it looked when purchased by Foxfire. From the outside, which was covered by siding, it was difficult to tell that the building was actually a log structure. Trees and vines had grown up, nearly covering parts of the house. The furniture had been removed, and many of the windows were broken out. The chimney shown here served room D.
PLATE 393 Another view of the house, looking along room G to the kitchen, H.
PLATE 394 The porch beyond rooms A and C had collapsed, so we began by removing the rotten debris and then tearing the siding off rooms A and C, which had been added to the original house in the 1920s.
PLATE 395 Beneath the long walls of the additions and the original house were solid foundations of flat rocks mortared by red clay. The foundation work beneath the entire building was one of its most striking features, most log houses being built simply on rock pillars. All the foundation rocks were loaded onto trucks and taken to the reconstruction site.
PLATE 396 The curved hand-cut rocks that once were steps are visible, stacked around the base of the chimney to help support it when years of rain finally washed the dirt out from under its corners. At the far left side of the photo, the end of room G is visible, supported by a post to keep it from collapsing before we could dismantle it. According to both Moot and Mitch, the bank visible under the room was not cut out by hand but was formed as the clay was eroded away from the house by rain.
PLATE 397 The siding for the F-H addition, or the kitchen wing, was removed first.
PLATE 398 In the kitchen addition, H, the rafters were round poles, lap-jointed and pegged.
PLATE 399 When the kitchen was removed, an elaborate piece of mortised and pegged work was revealed, supporting the roof line for the dining room, F, at a point where F and H had joined around the kitchen chimney.
PLATE 400
PLATE 401 The corner post beneath this point was supported by a diagonal brace …
PLATE 402 … the inside of which had been chiseled out by hand so that what was left matched the thickness of the walls. The diagonal support was mortised into the corner post and floor joist and pegged into place—a remarkable piece of work.
PLATE 403 The outside corners of the kitchen featured a similar construction, as did the outside corner of G.
PLATE 404 Upstairs in the original house we found hewed, pegged rafters and perfectly preserved interior log walls.
PLATE 405 The handmade window frames, which were pegged into the wall logs, were carefully removed, intact, to be used in the reconstruction.
PLATE 406
PLATE 407 Like the window frames, the door frames were also pegged into the wall logs—a technique that not only anchored the frames tightly into place, but also kept the wall logs separated and in line.
PLATE 408 Students from a Foxfire class helped former students Clay Smith and Darryl Garland set the foundation logs (sills) and floor joists for the two-story section into place first.
PLATE 409 The measurements for the floor joists for the first floor of the two-story section.
PLATE 410 One of the sill logs for the F-G addition.
PLATE 411 The internal dimensions of the upstairs and downstairs portions of the house we actually moved to Mountain City.
PLATE 412 See Plate 411.
PLATE 413 The sill log diagrammed in Plate 436 is visible in this photo, set into place against the sill log for the two-story section. As the wall logs were set back into place on their new foundation, there was ample opportunity to plumb the walls again and straighten any portions that had sagged with age.
PLATE 414 From the lower side, the full basement foundation wall is as impressive as it was originally.
PLATE 415 Door jambs and window frames were repegged as in the original house.
PLATE 417 Next, the wall logs for the second floor were added.
PLATE 418 With the final 48-foot-long wall logs anchored into place, the original rafters were replaced and pegged at their bases into the wall logs.
PLATE 419
PLATE 420 Their lap-jointed peaks were also repegged together.
PLATE 421
PLATE 422 The lighter-colored logs in the end of the building are new logs that had to be cut and fitted to replace rotten ones.
PLATE 423
PLATE 424 A pegged mortise and tenon joint held the sills together at their corners. A mortise was also cut into the top of the corner to hold the base of the vertical corner post.
PLATE 425
PLATE 426
PLATE 427 The top of the long sill was also mortised at regular intervals to hold the vertical wall studs.
PLATE 428 The vertical corner post was fitted back into its mortise, and its diagonal brace was replaced and pegged.
PLATE 429
PLATE 430 The top of the diagonal brace was shaped to fit a mortise cut in the side of the vertical post.
PLATE 431
PLATE 432 The wall studs, diagonal braces, and sills were coded with Roman numerals by the original builders to show where each piece fitted.
PLATE 433 The top of each vertical corner post was shaped into tenons to hold the porch stringers.
PLATE 434
PLATE 435
PLATE 436
PLATE 437 The reassembled corner.
PLATE 438
PLATE 439 This plate, the one that follows, and the accompanying diagram show how the two sections of the stringer that runs the length of the addition were shaped and joined and pegged in the middle.
PLATE 440
PLATE 441
PLATE 442 The porch stringers at each end of the addition not only fitted down over the mortises cut into the vertical corner support posts, but their opposite ends were also notched and pegged into the wall of the main part of the house itself.
PLATE 443
PLATE 444
PLATE 445 At the opposite end of the addition, the same construction was evident except for the section shown here (and mentioned earlier), built to support the roof line when the kitchen was added.
Since the chimney that stood between the kitchen and dining room addition (F and H) is not going to be replaced, new studs were cut and fitted into the hole in the wall left where the chimney used to stand.
PLATE 446
PLATE 447
PLATE 448 Each of the ceiling joists in the original addition was mortised into a wall log of the main house and notched on the underside of the opposite end to fit over the stringer that ran the length of the addition. One-by-eight-foot boards were nailed to the underside of these joists to form a ceiling, and the stud walls and log walls were paneled with the same material. This paneling was all salvaged and will be replaced.
PLATE 449 Standing on the addition’s ceiling joists are Frank Hickox (left) and Pat Shields, who supervised the moving and reconstruction. They are preparing to add the rafters for the addition. On the ground is Scott Shope, maneuvering for a camera angle.
PLATE 450 The house as it looks today. The location selected for the house is a wooded area with a view of the surrounding mountains from nearly all sides. The house overlooks a stream and what will eventually be a park.
As soon as the necessary funds are secured, the chimneys and shingle roof will be added, as well as the interior paneling, doors, windows, chinking, etc. On the side opposite the addition, a full porch will be added that will approximate the original as closely as possible and will afford a view of the park, the stream, and the mountains beyond.
PLATE 451
PUNCHEON FLOORS
Some of the earliest Appalachian houses had dirt floors. Later on, people wanted wooden floors and if there wasn’t a sawmill available, they had to figure out a way to make their wooden floors by hand.
One type of floor they came up with was called a puncheon floor. These were made of hand-split boards about six feet long, up to two feet wide, and two to three inches thick laid on top of hewn log joists. They were usually made of poplar wood, but some people told us that chestnut and oak were also used.
There is a diagram of a puncheon floor in the Foxfire Book, but we have looked for about fourteen years for one we could photograph and hadn’t found one till now.
Wig was stripping the floor out of an old log house he bought and under it was an original puncheon floor. This was an exciting discovery for all of us, so we went to his house and photographed and measured several of the boards.
We also asked our grandparents what they knew about them. Dan’s grandmother, Flory Rogers, and Charles’s grandfather (who is Dan’s uncle), Will Patterson, told us about the tools they used for making the puncheon boards. A wedge, sometimes called a glut, was used with a wooden maul to split the big logs. Usually a tree, at least twelve inches in diameter and often two feet or more, was cut into logs six to eight feet in length. Then these logs were split into widths of two to three inches by hammering the wedge in with the maul. A hand plane was used to smooth the top of the boards off.
Betty Jo Woods, a seventh-grade student, asked her grandfather Mark Snyder and her uncle Sam Snyder what they could tell her about puncheons. They added that the trees should be cut in early spring or late fall when the sap was down, and after the boards were split out, they should be stacked in ricks to air-dry for at least three months before being put down as the floor. Also they said that some people smoothed the boards with a foot adze and fitted them together with a tool called a floor dog, a tool that looks like a set of log grabs with a hook.
DAN CRANE AND CHARLES PHILLIPS
PLATE 452
PLATE 453 The puncheon in place on the joist, which is resting on the main log sleeper.
PLATE 454 Charles Phillips in front of Wig’s log house, showing the underside of a puncheon board, this one made of poplar.
PLATE 455 Dan Crane showing top side of same board.
PLATE 456 This shows the whole floor.
CARLTON NICHOLS MAKES A MAUL
Carlton Nichols is my grandfather. He lives on Persimmon. Sometimes I go over to his house on weekends and stay with him, helping him work around the house and on his farm, and sometimes we take his dogs and go ’coon hunting together.
One weekend when I was over there, I noticed a wooden tool in the garage. I’d never seen one before, so I asked him what it was. He said that it was a maul for driving fence posts or splitting logs and that he made it himself.
When I started taking Foxfire courses I remembered the maul, and I asked him if he would let us interview him on how to make one. He was more than happy to help us out, and we started by looking for the right tree in the woods behind his house. After we located a good white oak sapling with a knot in the trunk, we chopped it down and carried out the piece we needed. He then gave us step-by-step directions for how to make this particular tool. The pictures that follow show how it was done.
My grandfather also gave us some tips on maul making and use that are not included in the directions and pictures. He cuts it out while the wood is green. Then he takes it indoors to the fireplace and allows it to bake for about two hours by a good hot fire. The big end should go toward the fire, and it should bake all the way around. This helps it cure out faster so that it won’t split. Then he lets it air-dry in his shed before using it so that it will be good and hard.
My grandfather also said that you should keep the maul always in the dry and out of the weather. He also told us that a wooden maul should only be used with wooden wedges and not those made of steel.
CHRIS JARRARD
Article and photographs by Chris Jarrard and Dan Crane.
HOW TO MAKE A BROADAX HANDLE
This is an article about Fr
ank Vinson making a handle for a broadax. A broadax handle is different from a regular ax handle in that it is shorter (only twenty-eight inches long), and is curved. A broadax is used for hewing the sides of logs off for a log house, and so the handle is curved so that as the person hews, his hands will be out away from the side of the log and he won’t skin his knuckles.
PLATE 457 Carlton, Dan, and Sandy, Carlton’s dog, go to the woods to look for a white oak tree to make a maul.
PLATE 458 Carlton finds a good one while Dan watches.
PLATE 459 Chris carries the tree out to a flat place so he can cut the piece off that Carlton wants to make the maul out of.
PLATE 460 They carry it to the house to work on it.
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