Tom Dillard: Arkansas Postings

Tom Dillard: Arkansas trees shaped the homes of the state for generations

Pioneer settlers of Arkansas found a great richness of timber. Among the tough hardwoods were 29 oak species, with white and red oaks being particularly abundant, along with 10 species of hickory, not to mention the softwood pines.

The dense forests were both a blessing and a challenge to early settlers. They provided resources for building homes, barns, and other outbuildings, but had to be cleared in order to grow crops.

New arrivals often lived out of a wagon while building a house. Log houses, typical throughout Arkansas until after the Civil War, involved felling a large number of trees, trimming the limbs and tops, and removing the bark. Since the logs had to be lifted by hand, houses were of necessity limited to between 12 and 18 feet and usually square.

A Pope County settler in 1839 wrote to his family back in North Carolina that he had built "a right smart little cabin with a plank floor." Wayman Hogue, who grew up in rural Faulkner County in a log house after the Civil War, recalled his boyhood home as "one large room built of scalped logs, chinked and daubed, and floored with puncheons hewn smooth."

Puncheons were logs which had been split lengthwise with the flat side dressed smooth using a broad axe specially designed for that purpose.

A fireplace was usually constructed at one end of the cabin. Stones were often used when they were available, but in much of Arkansas the fireplace was made of clay, with the chimney built of wood and surfaced with clay.

Hogue recalled that his boyhood home had a stone fireplace, but the "extending chimney was built of split sticks heavily daubed and covered with clay, which when dry was very substantial." He went on to say that the clay-daubed chimney would sometimes crack, "leaving the wood parts exposed, and when the weather was chilly and the fires large, my father would have to throw water up the chimney to extinguish the blaze."

As a family grew more prosperous, lean-to rooms were often added to the main house. In order to prevent fires and to make the house more comfortable in hot weather, kitchens were usually situated in small structures behind the home.

My impression is that settlers of modest means often started off with small log homes which they replaced as circumstances allowed and families grew. O.W. Taylor, a longtime Baptist minister and progenitor of a family of gifted children, recalled late in life that his father built three homes on their farm in Union County.

The first was a 12-foot by 14-foot log structure. The second, also made of logs, was larger and better situated. In 1905 Taylor's father bought a sufficient quantity of lumber at 1 cent per board foot to construct a frame house consisting of two large rooms, a sizable central hall, and additional smaller rooms at the back. A detached kitchen and privy completed the residence. The family was proud that each room had a window.

The senior Taylor was unusually skilled at working with wood; he was also a blacksmith and made many of his woodworking tools, such as a froe, an L-shaped tool involving a wooden handle and a metal blade, driven into logs to make shingles, fence palings, and other split boards.

The well-heeled Charles Lewis Bullock, a North Carolinian who migrated in the late 1840s to Dallas County, purchased a "small two room log house, with stick chimneys and with wooden shutters for windows."

Within a year, Bullock sold his house and built a new home with six large rooms and wide halls. The walls were of hewn logs, carefully dovetailed together and covered with weatherboarding. Covering a log house with clapboards was common; many is the modern man who began restoration of an old house and discovered it started out as a log building.

Bullock's daughter later recalled the family's enslaved workforce lived in cabins "built of smaller logs, chinked and daubed, and had puncheon floors, stick chimneys, wooden shutters for windows, and they were covered with split boards." By "split boards" she meant long, crudely formed shingles, which in Dallas County could certainly have been made from cypress logs.

She also recalled that "the outside of the house was painted white; some of the rooms were light blue or dove colored." White seems to have been a common color for painting houses, although "whitewash"-- a slurry of lime and water -- was commonly used as a cheap alternative to paint. In antebellum Little Rock, several business buildings were painted blue, which must have given the small river town an interesting look.

Houses were often unpainted even in 20th-century Arkansas. In 1936, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Arkansas, local officials painted the fronts of homes along the highway the presidential party traveled from Malvern to Hot Springs.

The occasional settler of means could afford a larger house. Richard C. Rhodes, a physician from North Carolina who settled near the Saline River in Grant County around 1850, built a house of eight rooms with a detached kitchen. He had large glass windows, and his fireplaces were built of bricks made on the site. Among the numerous outbuildings on the Rhodes farm was an octagonal smokehouse.

In addition to homes and outbuildings, wood was also used for fencing throughout the 19th century. Straight logs were split into rails, usually of about 10 feet in length. These rail fences, also called worm fences, kept livestock out of cultivated fields. For years after the Civil War, Southerners complained that Union soldiers destroyed their fence rails by using them for firewood.

Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in Hot Spring County. Email him at [email protected]. An earlier version of this column was published Feb. 28, 2010.

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