The 1740s Log Farmhouse

 

 

Above: Driveway to the log farmhouse.

 

The Timbering: Blockstanderbau:

 

The log farmhouse at the Hess Homestead is constructed with a Germanic architectural technique known as Blockstanderbau, featuring vertical log corner posts, with many other vertical and diagonal timbers.

Colonial Pennsylvania house builders brought corner-post traditions with them from Europe. This form of post-and-beam construction is widespread throughout Germanic Europe.

This corner-post design is unusual for historic Pennsylvania log houses. Most 18th-century log houses in Pennsylvania used a V notch for joining corners, rather than using corner posts. This Hess house is considered one of the most elaborate surviving examples of Blockstanderbau corner-post design.

Blockstanderbau houses are, in effect, half-timbered houses. The horizontal timbers are for infill, rather than for load-bearing support. These horizontals serve the same function as brick infill or wattle-and-daub filler in other half-timber framing.

The Hess log farmhouse originally had 33 vertical posts, of which most survive. The horizontal timbers are tenoned into mortises chiseled into the posts. At each tenon is a chiseled-in guide symbol, consisting of a Roman numeral or other directional mark. Each corner has two interior, diagonal braces. The four corner posts are tenoned into interlocking sill logs.

 

Above: Diagonal timbers in the Küche (kitchen).

Above: Roman numeral marks to guide assembly of the logs.

 

 

First-Period Floor Plan: Durchgängiges Haus:

 

The log farmhouse's primary front door opens into a central hallway which is surrounded by a nonsymmetrical arrangement of interior rooms, including the Küche (kitchen), Stube (stove room), and Arbeitsraum (work room).

Although this central hallways is suggestive of the English central hallways of Pennsylvania's Georgian houses, this hallway's DNA is more Germanic than British. Architecture historians describe these houses as durchgängiges Haus (through-passage house). This floor plan has deep roots in Germany's rural architecture. Prototypes for Pennsylvania's durchgängiges floor plans are illustrated in German books as early as the 17th century.

The Stube (stove room) was heated by a five-plate stove fed from a small firepace in the central hallway. Beneath the stove room is a vaulted root cellar for food storage. This stove room also served as the Kammer (parents' bedroom).

The second floor's walls were heightened, ca. 1813, to a full story from the original half-story height, using dove-tailed corner timbering. The original, hand-hewn rafters were reused, and a full attic was added, included a Rauchenkammer (smoke room) for smoking meats with smoke from the stovepipe. The house's renovations and additions occured ca. 1788, ca. 1813, ca. 1860, ca. 1941, and 1986.

_______________________________

 

 The Bake Oven:

 

 Above: The reconstructed squirrel-tail bake oven with 18th-century, Pennsylvania-German roof tiles.

During the restoration of the log farmhouse in the mid 1980s, Clarke Hess located the foundation of the original bake oven attached to the east side of the house. He also found numerous fragments of clay roof tile at that location, so he was able to accurately reconstruct that structure. All the roof tiles are 18th-century, except the single row of cap tiles which were made by potter Lester Breininger.

The original bake oven was added to the house ca. 1788 during the house's first renovation. The oven was accessed inside the house, in the work room. The hole in the oven's base is for removing ashes from the ash dump.

 __________________________________

 

 

 Above: 18th-century retaining wall beside the log farmhouse.

When the log farmhouse was constructed in the 1740s, the adjoining hillside was terraced to allow the house to be constructed near the slope. The hillside was faced with limestone walls. These beautifully-constructed walls remain an enduring feature of the homestead's landscape.  This section of wall retains traces of whitewash. 

 

 __________________________________