the shingles and clapboards, especially in the west of the island.

All four of the trees used in the basic log house were common on the island, though the size of log required (Selkirk (1805) said eight inches in diameter) could only have come from relatively young trees, Such as would have been found in second-growth or successional woodland. In the area of the French clearances and fires, spruce, fir and also white birch were prevalent, as we have seen earlier, and many of the trees on those sites would presumably have also been of a convenient size. However, I expect there would also have been many places where these species, or at least trees of the required size, were not readily at hand, and thus, as Selkirk (1803) indicated, sometimes the logs would have had to have been brought from a distance.“6

Using the dimensions given in the sources, it is an easy matter to calculate the number of logs, and thus the number of spruce or pine trees, required to build the standard log house. Using the wall height of six feet given by both Curtis (1775) and MacGregor (1828), and the log width of eight inches given by Selkirk (1803), and assuming the logs to be unhewn, nine logs would have been required for each side, or 36 logs for the four walls; if the walls were the 7 foot height that MacGregor (1828) gives as a maximum, then either ten or eleven logs would have been needed per side — 40 or 44 trees in total.“7 If the floor and ceiling were also of split logs, as they were in some houses, then for a house of a length of 20 feet, another 30 logs would have been required for these. Of course other logs (probably split or hewn) would have been required for the rafters (MacGregor says there were three or four rafters), and also for the two gables (these were probably also splitm). To build a log house of the maximum measurements given by the recorders,

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Selkirk (1803) had observed that where “the spruce logs [were] at a distance", there was “much hauling of the oxen".

‘27 From two photographs (nos. 35 and 38) on a web—site [www.virtualmuseumca] for the Doucet House of Cymbria (a house constructed of squared logs in c. 1768 and now restored at Rustico), I count eleven logs in both the front and the lefl side elevations.

425 We are not told how the gables were constructed by any of the Prince Edward Island recorders. However I note that Williams (1989) (p. 72), in his brief description of the American log-house, says that split logs were used for both the gables and the roof. ln island records, apart from the bark used in the rough first house, it is only boards that receive a mention as being used for the roof.

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the total number of trees needed comes to 82429, a figure virtually identical to the 80 logs quoted for an American log housem, and the volume of wood contained in the finished house structure works out at 447 cubic feet (or 11.2 tons)”. If, instead of using round logs, the whole house were constructed of hewn or squared logs, as were the second houses at Belfast, then larger trees would have been of use, with the logs being squared to the required size; if these were about eight inches square, a house of hewn logs would require about the same number of trees as one of round logs, though the volume of wood contained in the walls would have been greater.432 Using these figures, we can go on to estimate the number of trees required for all of the log houses likely to have been built on the island in pioneer days, as well as the volume of wood that they contained. As an example, we might take the number of ’occupiers of land’ recorded in the 1861 census (11,241) and assuming that each of these farms had once been occupied by a log house made of round logs, then 922,000 spruce and/or pine trees would have been required and the finished houses would have contained 125,900 tons of pine and/or spruce timber. To compare this with another value, in the fifteen years between 1806 and 1820, 151,000 tons of pine timber were exported from the island.433 These estimates of the wood and trees used in log cabins are amenable to further refinement, but for now they serve the purpose of demonstrating that the total amount of wood

‘29 For a house of 20‘ by 14', with a wall height of 7', and

assuming the pitch of the roof to be low, with four rafters of 8‘ length and an attic height of 4’, then the following logs are required: 44 for the walls, 30 for the floor and ceiling, 4 for the rafters (these being of split logs), and 4 for the gables (also split).

“3° Williams (1989) (p. 72) states that eighty logs were needed for the walls of the American log house. He also comments that the log house type of building was extravagant in its use of wood.

‘31 The log house is that described in footnote 429, and it is assumed that all the logs used are 8“ in diameter (the walls being of complete logs; the floor, ceiling, rafters and gables all of split logs). The 447 cubic feet of wood (or 11.2 tons) is made up of 261 cubic feet forthe four walls, 147 for the floor and ceiling, 11 for the four rafters, and 28 for the two gables.

432 A square timber of 8 inches by 8 inches has a cross-sectional area of 64 square inches compared with 50.2 square inches for a round log of 8 inch diameter. This difference would work itself through to the volume of wood contained in the walls (i.e. the four walls of hewn logs would contain 27.6% more timber than a house of unhewn logs).

‘33 The 151,000 is a summation of the annual values for pine timber exported from the island between 1806 and 1820, as contained in Table 1-2 (p. 26) of De Jong & Moore (1994); their data comes from the PARO, R.G. 9, Customs records,