The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  13

  One of the pleasures of renovating an old house is that, once a basic scheme of operation has been established, the work doesn’t fully occupy the mind. You have to pay some minimal level of attention, of course, lest you slice off a leg or suffer some other disaster, but the essentials having been dealt with, you’re free to ponder other things.

  I’d now arrived at that point with the piping of the radiators. The work had become routine, although engagingly so. I was nowhere near as proficient a pipe fitter as I was an electrician, but I’d attained a certain threshold competence. I knew the system would work. I had to pause periodically to noodle out some knotty detail, but had no doubt I would.

  In short, life had lightened up. Notwithstanding the edge of desperation that had come to be a constant feature of the project, there was something therapeutic about working with your hands, and it was in this moderately cheery state that I began to contemplate my surroundings. It was now possible to see the house’s framing in all its unencumbered glory. Howard had been right: The house had good bones. Indeed, from the standpoint of scale, it had bones such as are to be found in no house built in the last half century, log cabins set aside. It was all very well to see balloon framing illustrated in books. The reality was more impressive.

  During breaks I strolled around inspecting the premises. The house had been framed so that, except in the odd cranny (the joists I had to drill through for the radiator pipes were in one), the studs and joists were sixteen inches apart, measured centerline to centerline. The great majority of houses in the United States are built to this standard, which has prevailed since at least the Civil War.67 That may seem unimportant, even obsessive, but in fact it’s pretty handy. Because of it you can hang forty-eight-inch-wide sheets of drywall without having to custom fit each piece; you can run standard-width air-conditioning ducts between studs; you can install standard insulation, which is fourteen and a half inches wide, the distance between the facing sides of studs or joists. (Truth be told, insulation installed in an old house will be a little snug, because two-by-fours sawn a hundred years ago are three-sixteenths of an inch wider than those cut yesterday afternoon, but luckily the fiberglass readily compresses.) You can, in short, retrofit an old house . . . well, I won’t say cheaply, but at least in a relatively systematic and predictable way. For this you can thank the standardization of American building practice ushered in by balloon framing.

  Balloon framing is treated only briefly, if respectfully, in histories of architecture and construction because, frankly, there isn’t much to tell. The technique was invented in Chicago in 1833 by one Augustine D. Taylor, a carpenter from Connecticut who’d been commissioned to build the city’s first Catholic church. The pastor of this church, it’s safe to say, wasn’t free with cash—the contract amount was $400, ultimately paid in the form of eight hundred silver half-dollars. The standard wood construction methods of the day called for a “New England frame” of heavy beams and posts held together with hand-hewn mortise and tenon joints, construction of which required a large crew of skilled carpenters. Undoubtedly realizing that if he built the church in this way he’d lose his shirt, Taylor devised a new method of framing using two-by-fours and nails, mass production of which had been perfected a short time before. His essential insight was that a building composed of many lightweight timbers was just as strong as one made of a few heavy ones, and was boatloads easier to erect. Taylor’s approach had two advantages: (1) the materials were abundant and cheap; and (2) assuming you had one guy who knew what he was doing (presumably Taylor), you could get by with three carpenters, two of whom could be relatively unskilled helpers.68 Balloon framing was quickly adopted for residential and other light construction throughout the United States and made possible the explosive growth of American cities during the nineteenth century.

  Useful as balloon framing was, it had a significant drawback: Buildings constructed in this way were firetraps. Balloon-framed walls were hollow; wall insulation in those days was unknown. The space enclosed by the long timbers provided an unobstructed passage—a flue, if you will—from the basement to the attic. If a fire started in the basement and reached the exterior walls, it would race up to the roof in minutes, and there went the house, and possibly the neighborhood. City houses in those days were built close together; firefighting methods were primitive. Not surprisingly, catastrophic fires in nineteenth-century cities were common. Everyone has heard of the Chicago fire of 1871 (300 dead, 18,000 buildings destroyed) and the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 (498 dead, 28,000 buildings destroyed). But we’ve largely forgotten the Seattle fire of 1889 (29 square blocks destroyed, including most of the city’s downtown), the Boston fire of 1872 (775 buildings destroyed), the Baltimore fire of 1904 (1,526 buildings), the St. Louis fire of 1849 (430 buildings), and the Pittsburgh fire of 1845 (1,200 buildings). Probably there are others, but those are the ones that came up when I Googled “great xxx fire,” substituting for xxx the names of the first dozen large U.S. cities that popped into my head. As I say, they had a lot of fires in those days.

  As it turned out, there was a relatively easy way to eliminate the flue problem, although it wasn’t universally adopted for a hundred years. An example was then taking shape at the rear of the Barn House, where the carpenters were constructing the kitchen, the family room, and the master bedroom. It was called platform framing. Rather than heave up exterior studs extending the height of the building, the carpenters were building the addition one story at a time—raising the walls, decking over the result with floor joists and plywood (a platform), then starting the next floor. The platform prevented easy passage of flame from one floor to the next; fire-resistant fiberglass wall insulation filling the space between the studs provided an additional measure of safety.

  Fire prevention wasn’t the only reason carpenters abandoned balloon framing for platform framing, though. The other reason was perhaps more urgent, and not without some relevance today: They’d used up the wood.

  Therein lies an instructive tale. The Barn House had been erected at the height of what may be unblushingly described as the golden age of wood construction in the United States. You may object: The golden age of wood? That’s like talking about the golden age of linoleum. Wood is so . . . ordinary. Just my point. Wood was the default material for every application at the time of the Barn House’s construction. It had been used not just for the framing—90 percent of American homes are still framed with wood—but for the siding (cedar clapboards over pine boards, in contrast to the vinyl or aluminum over waferboard sheathing commonly seen today), the roof (cedar shakes rather than asphalt shingles), flooring (oak or maple over pine planking rather than tile or carpet over plywood), even the wooden lath that supported the plaster. In the basement, six-by-six-inch pine posts supported eight-by-ten beams, which in turn carried two-by-ten floor joists. The doors were solid pine or oak, not the hollow-core wood or metal variety common now. The wooden baseboards were eleven inches high and topped with a formidable milled cap. Each window and door was trimmed with a five-inch-wide decorative wooden frame consisting of a finely milled casing surrounded by an equally complicated backband (to my ear the terms have a fittingly old-fashioned ring, though they’re familiar enough to finish carpenters). Wood had been used for purposes for which it was patently unsuited, such as the tracks for the pocket doors, which in all likelihood due to friction and misalignment hadn’t opened freely since the time the house was built. (We eventually replaced those on the heavier door with steel.) The only things not made of wood in the place were the foundation, chimneys, glass, plaster, wiring, hardware, tile, and pipes—and in old cities from time to time you heard of backhoe operators unearthing even pipes made of wood, usually cored-out logs or sometimes large-diameter tubes assembled from staves like a barrel.

  The Barn House’s profligate use of wood was typical of its era, when the American economy depended on wood to an extent that today we find hard to fathom. Wood was the cou
ntry’s principal building material and fuel source and easiest source of cash. In 1865, forest products accounted for half the internal revenue of the United States. True, the most prestigious buildings were constructed of masonry, and later masonry and steel; increasingly building codes in the larger cities required that permanent structures be made of fireproof materials, particularly after the 1871 disaster in Chicago. Nonetheless, wood remained by far the most common U.S. building material throughout the nineteenth century. Building styles originating in Europe and employed there largely in masonry buildings—the Greek Revival, the Italianate, the Gothic Revival, the Queen Anne—were imported to America and rendered in wood. The wide availability of machine-made wooden ornament from the 1870s onward made it possible to produce what now strike us as fantastically ornate buildings at modest cost. The wealthiest Americans built palatial country “cottages” out of wood, the most spectacular in what the architectural historian Vincent Scully has termed the Shingle Style, so called because they were covered in cascades of wooden shingles.

  The significance of all this didn’t fully penetrate till I got talking to Chester, the chief Polish carpenter. Chester was a big, friendly St. Bernard of a man with an extraordinary capacity for taking pains—I’d seen him spend hours after the other carpenters had gone home one afternoon shimming the family room floor joists till they were precisely level and true. One day I asked Chester whether carpentry in Poland was the same as carpentry in the United States.

  No, he said. Houses in Poland were built primarily of masonry. Polish carpenters used wood mainly for interior work—trim, stairs, cabinetry and so on (one reason they did such beautiful work, it occurred to me—they’d been trained in the expectation that everything would show). Later I realized why Polish and American construction methods differed—the United States had big forests to supply the wood, and Poland didn’t. What’s more, when the Barn House had been built, the United States had had really big forests—so big that it’s fair to say that at the time most Americans, certainly including the inhabitants of the upper Midwest, thought of the countryside not as farmland sporadically interrupted by trees, as now, but rather as a continuous carpet of forest at which civilization was slowly nibbling away. The Barn House’s oversized timbers had been cut from the gigantic trees in this seemingly infinite expanse. This was the virgin forest.

  I’m far from the first to marvel at the virgin forest, but it remains a topic on which it’s worthwhile to dawdle. At the start of European settlement nearly half the land area of the future United States, 822 million acres, was covered with trees. Virtually all the country east of the Mississippi—the Illinois prairie was the major exception—consisted of a single uninterrupted expanse of timber. By 1920 it was mostly gone, felled in an orgy of tree-cutting the like of which hasn’t been seen before or since. Today we scold the Brazilians for laying waste to the Amazon rain forest, but Americans a century ago cut more trees in less time with fewer people. By 2007, the better part of five hundred years after the start of European settlement, Brazilians had despoiled not quite 20 percent of the billion acres of Amazon rain forest under their control—195 million acres. (Admittedly most of the clearing has occurred since 1970.) By 1920, in contrast, Americans had cleared or radically disturbed more than 80 percent of the virgin timber-lands of the United States—684 million acres.69

  The trees of the upper Midwest, which supplied the raw material for the Barn House, were particularly prized. Mostly they were white or Norway pines, part of the boreal forest known as the North Woods, which extended as far east as Maine and New Brunswick and as far north as Hudson Bay. White pines were straight and tall—some specimens reached a height of two hundred feet. The wood was strong, durable, largely free of knots, and easily worked. The lumber could readily be gotten out—the central part of the continent was served by a wide-reaching system of lakes and rivers that, with a few man-made additions, made it possible to distribute midwestern lumber almost anywhere in the eastern two-thirds of the country via the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, and the Mississippi River and its tributaries. New technology—the circular mill saw, steam railroads, tractors—permitted the cutting and milling of lumber on an industrial scale. With the pine forests of New England depleted, loggers eyeing the upper Midwest thought: Whoa.

  In 1898, a Chicago lumberman-turned-historian named George Hotchkiss estimated that the states of the old Northwest Territory (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, and Illinois, although Illinois’s contribution was relatively minor) had once been covered by a trillion board feet of commercial-quality lumber, the majority of it pine—enough to reach from the earth to the sun and back. He may have exaggerated, but not by much. Some 310 billion board feet of pine were cut and sold during the heyday of midwestern lumbering. The boom didn’t last long. Commercial logging of the Midwest began in earnest around 1840, reached its height between 1860 and 1900, then entered a steep decline and by 1930 had all but ceased.

  The process was appallingly wasteful. The circular saws of the day had such wide blades, typically five-sixteenths of an inch, that a mill sawing one-inch planks turned 312 board feet into sawdust for every thousand feet cut.70 Logged-off stumplands full of pine cuttings were subject to repeated wildfires. On October 8, 1871, one such fire destroyed Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and neighboring towns, killing fifteen hundred people—a catastrophe that went largely unnoticed because of the fire that leveled Chicago the same day.71

  Still, the plundering of the forests had its benefits, the foremost being that it helped create, in addition to the Barn House, the country we now know. Tree clearance opened up 300 million acres of prime agricultural land. Midwestern logging generated more wealth than the California gold rush. The unavailability of heart pine flooring, it’s true, wouldn’t have appreciably altered the course of American civilization. But balloon framing and cheap wood—in 1874, a thousand board feet of lumber could be had at wholesale for six dollars, one-sixty-seventh of the average price 125 years later—made it possible to populate a largely empty continent fast.72

  Late Victorian wooden buildings like the Barn House—built from, say, 1875 to 1900—were the fullest flowering of this extravagant era. The larger examples, plus a few others built in the early twentieth century, collectively constitute the most elaborate wooden structures ever erected in the United States. Mainly they were built for pleasure, or the business of pleasure—suburban houses, summer homes, country estates and clubhouses, resort hotels (one of the largest still extant, the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, extends over thirty-one acres and incorporates 3 million shingles). Wood let you do things that could be achieved with more durable materials only at vastly greater expense. Queen Annes in particular73 were purposely built to be picturesque, full of turrets and balconies and sprawling porches (the Barn House’s porch wasn’t especially expansive, but those of many Queen Annes in the neighborhood and near my parents’ house in Oak Park were). The style wasn’t original—it had been invented in the UK, after all—and I suppose we’d have to concede it was sentimental. But it was fun and democratic in a way the more celebrated residential architecture of the period wasn’t. My house and others like it had been the work of ordinary folk whose goal wasn’t to awe but to delight—and how often, where the built environment is concerned, can you say that?74

  It couldn’t last. After the turn of the century the use of wood receded, partly because wood was becoming scarcer and the price was starting to rise, at least in the Northeast and Midwest. (The construction of enormous wooden houses persisted for some years on the West Coast, where large stands of timber remained and lumber prices presumably were lower.) Builders began substituting cheaper materials—stucco for cedar siding, asphalt shingles for wooden ones. Platform framing replaced balloon framing to some extent because the enormous timbers required for the latter were growing hard to come by. Per capita consumption of lumber plummeted, as did the use of wood for fuel, the coal industry having taken over the market. Annual U.S. consumption of
wood—and I mean the aggregate for the entire country, not per capita—peaked in 1907 and thereafter dropped by a sixth, not surpassing the earlier total until the 1980s, by which time the country’s population was more than three times as large.

  Depending on your point of view, therefore, you might regard the Barn House as either the gift of a lost age or a symbol of un-sustainable recklessness. What you weren’t entitled to do, in my opinion, was claim it represented some high-water mark of quality from which all subsequent home building represented a retreat. I knew this because I was seeing even then what the Polish carpenters could do.

  At some point during the siege of the radiators—I don’t recall exactly when, except that it was a sunny day and the house was silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky—I drove up to the Barn House, glanced at the roof, and realized immediately that something was wrong. Although only a couple of rafters were in place, I could see that the pitch of the reconstructed turret roof now beginning to take shape was too shallow. I went upstairs to consult with Chester, who showed me the drawings. They called for a 1:1 rise, and that was what he and the other carpenters were building—and from the standpoint of construction technique, doing an admirable job. Looked at from above, the turret roof was octagonal. This wasn’t the sort of thing readily framed, and Charlie, at our direction (we were trying to save money), hadn’t provided any detailed drawings of how it was to be accomplished, on the optimistic assumption that the carpenters could figure it out. Chester’s solution had been to install an octagonal king post, or upright central timber, that as far as I could tell he had basically whittled out of a four-by-four. The base of the king post rested on what would eventually be ceiling joists in my third-floor office; a rafter from each of the eight corners of the turret roof was to rest against one of the eight sides of the king post, making a sort of teepee. (There were a few more subtleties, but that was the gist.) Though far from complete, it was already a pretty piece of work.