Page 10
History of Orange County
Towns of Goshen, Hamptonburgh and Chester
Page 10
The reader perhaps would be gratified to inspect this first erection on the patent of Wawayanda, and learn how it was put together, then view the furniture, and look over the table as it stood in preparation for the evening meal. We will gratify his curiosity, premising this remark, that, that rude structure, erected in a single day by a few laborers in the midst of a wilderness, in the great economy of peopling and settling the earth, in point of enlarged utility and beneficial result, far exceeded the costliest Pyramid of Egypt, erected through the reigns of many successive Kings, by the toil and blood of thousands on the fertile plains of the Nile. One was the busy, virtuous abode of the living, and sheltered the mother of a numerous race, the other, was but the cold sepulchre of a tyrant dead.
The hut was nearly square, 16 by 18 feet, and constructed thus: At the corners and sides, holes were dug into the ground and crotches set in them to serve as posts in an ordinary framed house. Poles were then laid round in the crotches to serve as plates, and fastened together with wood pins, made on the spot. A gutter was then excavated round outside the crotches, to receive the moisture in time of rain or in damp weather. In these gutters palasades split out of logs were set up on end, leaning inwards and against the poles in the crotches, and by hewing them, made to fit as close as possible against each other. Outside of all and opposite each other, at the ends of the building, two other crotches, higher than the palasades and crotches, were erected to hold the ridge pole, which determined the light and pitch of the roof which leaned against it. The roof was composed of poles, brush and bark pealed from the trees they had felled to split the palasades. The fire place was in the centre of the cabin, and the pots and kettles hung upon chains and trunnels suspended from a pole laid on two crotches. The smoke issued through a hole three feet square in the cone of the roof, which served for a sky light. The reader doubtless could now go to work and construct one equally elegant and commodious. It is being done every day in the now settling regions of the West. When the smoke had well cleared off and the atmosphere of the building so thinned as to be transparent, Sarah's comment upon it was, “what a hole to huddle in and spend a night in bad weather.”
The furniture was of a piece with the structure, and in good keeping and harmony with it. Among the articles were wood bowls and trenchers, of various workmanship and manufacture. The table was a large log some six or eight feet long, and well flatted off at the upper surface. In one corner of the cabin, holes were bored through the palasades. in which small timbers were inserted some two feet long, extending into the room and supported at the ends by uprights, upon which split slabs rested and constituted the fixed kitchen table and cupboard. The same kind of fixtures were in the other corners, and served for bedsteads; but in place of slabs, poles and brush were substituted as softer and more elastic. A long slab standing on peg feet, the only apology for, and representative of a chair, was intended to seat the members of the family. Though this was neither stylish nor very fashionable in the higher town and city circles, yet in the family arrangement it was comfortable, friendly and social. There were several other articles of furniture and housekeeping enumerated in the inventory, which the reader may observe in different parts of the room, waiting as it were to be assigned to a proper location.
We departed from the straight thread of our narrative, after the wigwam was taken possession of, to make this description, to which we now return.