American historic carpentry

Historically building methods were passed down from a master carpenter to an apprentice verbally, through demonstration, and through work experience.

[1] Designs, engineering details, floor plans, methods were time tested and communicated through rules of thumb rather than scientific study and documents.

The carpenters who found themselves in the New World based their work on their traditions but adapted to new materials, climate, and mix of cultures.

Carpentry is one of the traditional trades but is not always clearly distinguished from the work of the joiner and cabinetmaker, in general, a carpenter historically did the heavier, rougher work of framing a building including installing the sheathing and sub-flooring and installing pre-made doors and windows.

Plank generally means a piece of lumber (timber) rectangular in shape and thicker than a board.

The framing in barns is usually visible, but in houses is usually covered with the siding material on the outside and plaster or drywall on the inside.

These are examples of half timbering where the framing is infilled with another material such as a mud mixture, stones, or bricks.

Half timbering in America is found in limited areas, mostly of German settlement, including Old Salem, North Carolina, parts of Missouri, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania.

Described is an earthfast, hewn frame "filled in" (half-timbered) with riven clapboards for the siding, roofing and loft flooring.

This type of carpentry has a frame with horizontal beams or logs tenoned into slots or mortises in the posts.

It was apparently carried across much of the continent from Silesia by the Lausitz urnfield culture in the late Bronze Age.

"[5] Examples also persist in southern Sweden, in the Alps, Hungry, Poland, Denmark, and Canada.

This type of construction allows shorter timbers to be used and a building can be extended an indefinite length by adding more bays, typically measuring ten feet.

Similar methods of construction are found in most if not all Viking settled regions and was common in Scandinavia.

It is one of the earliest building types of French-Canada used extensively by the Hudson's Bay Company for trading posts across Canada.

Other French names reflect the shape of wood (bois) used between the posts such as planche en coulisse, madriers-, or pieux-.

A particularly interesting example is the Golden Plough Tavern (c. 1741), York, York County, PA, which has the ground level of corner-post construction, the second floor of fachwerk (half timbered) and was built for a German with other Germanic features[7] "This sophisticated system, which uses carefully constructed mortise-and-tenon joints, was common from the 1820s to the 1860s and represents some 5 percent of the log houses built in western Maryland.”[8] Occasionally these buildings have earthfast posts.

[9] Also known other parts of central Europe, Medieval British Isles, including (Switzerland, Austria and S. Germany),.

The carpentry consists of a timber frame with vertical planks extending from sill to plate.

Both wood shingle or clapboard exterior siding and interior lath and plaster attach directly to the planks.

A palisade is a series of vertical pales (stakes) driven or set into the ground to form a fence or barrier.

It was common for Native Americans and Europeans to build a palisade as part of a fort or to protect a village.

In Australia houses with vertical plank walls are called slab huts and the technique is similar to the American counterpart except in America these buildings may be two stories.

Some plank-wall houses or creole cottages in the New Orleans area are called bargeboard[14] or flatboat board[15] houses because the vertical planks used to build the walls were reused planks from barges (flatboats) floated down the Mississippi River loaded with cargo and then broken up and the lumber sold.

[10] Fowler mentions he had seen this wall type being built in central New York state while traveling in 1842.

This is the simplest type of framing but has historically been used for inexpensive cottages and farm shelters until the A-frame house was popularized in the 1950s as a style of vacation home in the United States.

In the 20th century, it was typical for carpenters to make their own trusses by nailing planks together with wood plates at the joints.

This method developed in the early 19th century for industrial mill floors but may also be found in timber framed roofs.