The Barn House (24 page)

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 country'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 particular
⁷³
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.

 

A
t 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.

Unfortunately, through no fault of Chester's, it was wrong. The slope of the transept roof, which the turret roof had to match, wasn't 1:1 but 4:3—the turret roof looked squashed by comparison. I called Charlie. He was apologetic. The third-floor framing had been so butchered during the 1930s remodeling that there was no easy way to determine the slope of the transept roof—he'd had to estimate. I groused that this wasn't the sort of thing safely left to guesswork. He didn't argue, but there we were. I informed Chester. He didn't look happy, but recognized what had to be done—namely, take the whole thing apart and start over, including whittling another king post; the new roof would be higher and the first post was too short. The following morning he gamely began.

A few days later I realized we had another problem. Paul the solid-flue guy, once he'd rebuilt the buckled chimney wall, had rebuilt the chimney top, partly because it was crumbling but mostly because we needed some additional height to clear the rebuilt turret roof, as required by city code. Now the roof was to be taller still, which meant that the chimney needed to be so as well. Unfortunately, Paul, who like just about everyone who worked on the Barn House had a bit of the artist in him, had terminated the chimney with a corbel—which is to say, the top flared out, each of the uppermost half dozen or so courses of bricks extending a half inch farther into space than the one immediately beneath. It was a handsome piece of masonry, but now it needed to be about three feet taller. I called Charlie again.

“So Charlie,” I said, “not to be critical, but not only is Chester tearing down the framing for the turret roof and starting over, at a cost of who knows how many thousands of dollars [in the event, two], I'm also going to have to have Paul tear off the corbeling and do
that
all over again. You know I have vast wealth, Charlie, but I was seriously not counting on having to rebuild this damned house twice.”

Charlie was silent for a moment. “Well,” he said, “you don't necessarily have to have Paul tear off the corbeling. He could just corbel back in, go up three feet, then corbel back out again.”

I tried to envision this. “Let me see if I follow you,” I said. “I zig out, then I zag in, then I zig out again. This is how they built the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Charlie.”

“Nah, it'll look sharp. I'll do a drawing. You'll see.”

The following morning the drawing arrived by fax. Charlie had provided front and side views. The side view showed the chimney guyed to the turret roof by what I took to be an ornamental wrought-iron strut—it looked like something out of
Mary Pop-pins.
I called Charlie and asked where he expected me to find a strut.

“Oh, that's optional,” Charlie said. “Never mind that. The chimney looks cool, doesn't it?”

I studied the drawing. Charlie's proposal had its points, no question. When I showed the drawing to Paul, he thought likewise, although I suspect that's partly because he didn't feel like starting over. At any rate, we corbeled the chimney as suggested, less the strut. Charlie had been right—it was the handsomest piece of masonry in the neighborhood, which wasn't saying much, given that the chimney on the house next door consisted of a stack of concrete blocks. But it was considerably more impressive than the Barn House's original chimney.