going into the first pioneer homes of islanders was relatively small in overall terms.

The frame house — Rather than up-grading the log house, it seems that on the island it was more common after a few years to replace it with a larger ’frame house’.434 There is comparatively little description in the contemporary island literature of the frame house, presumably because it was built in a style, and using techniques, already familiar to people in the British Isles, where timber-framed houses had been built for many centuries.“35 In fact it is only in the early twentieth century when traditional ’timber-framing’ as a building technique had become obsolete that Sir Andrew Macphail recorded a brief description

of the tasks involved:

To build a house in those days was a simple affair. The tools required for a beginning were a chalk-line and black—stick, a narrow ax, a broad-ax and a whipsaw. A tree was felled, trimmed of its branches and cut to proper length. Sills, posts, plates, rafters, joists, studs, were hewn from trees of corresponding size. The boards were ripped from the largest logs. For shingles the log was sawn across in short lengths [and] the block was splot with a wide iron wedge; When the lumber was assembled the building of the house was a mere diversion, To build a frame house was a long labour, and [many] were content for some years with a house

built of unhewn logs. ”.436

Apart from this, we also have from 1784 a useful nugget of valuable information related to the building of one particular frame-house. This was the house that Captain John MacDonald intended to build for himself at Tracadie, and we only have this information because he had been living in England for some years, and felt the need to provide detailed written instructions from a distance to his sister Nelly, who was to oversee the work.437 His principal concern, however, in

m Selkirk (1803) mentions a size of 20 feet by 15 feet ‘inside’ for a frame house — which is not much larger than the floor area of the first year‘s cabin, though it is twice the floor space of the 12 by 12 foot cabin that Father McEachern recommended for the first year.

"5 There is even less comment in the records on the structure of barns and farm-buildings, whether log or frame. Lawson (1851) (p. 49, not extracted) said that in long settled communities the “log barn" had given way to a frame building. The only other comment in the extracts is that of Johnstone (1822) (p. 98, not extracted) on the floors of barns and stables: “As they have no proper paving stones, not only their barns but their stables and byres are all laid with wood, and sometimes a part is laid with planks before the hall door" — this latter comment may rather refer to a platform outside the front door of the house.

‘” Macphail 1939.

437

MacDonald 1784.

67

the written 'lnstructions’ was where on the island she was going to find the wood needed to build the house. In his lengthy examination of this problem, he divided the wood that was needed into two separate categories, each of which he foresaw as presenting different problems in its acquisition. Firstly, there were the house ’timbers’, what MacDonald called the ”timber for the Frame, Logs, Joists and Couples438 for the roof etc.” For these, the problem consisted of locating suitable stands of trees that could supply the required timber, getting skilled axemen or timber— hewers to cut and hew that timber, and then transporting the timbers to the building site. Secondly, there was what we would nowadays call the ’lumber’ needed — though MacDonald does not use that North American term — namely, the wood produced by using a saw or other tools: he lists these as the ’boards’, ’clapboards or feather edged boards’, ’shingles’ and ’laths’. For these materials MacDonald saw two different options: either they could be ordered from a sawmill - and it is interesting that the only mill that he considered that could supply these materials was one at Pict0u in Nova Scotia, with them being brought to Tracadie by schooner. Or, he said, they could be hand-sawn on the island in a pit.439 For this, suitable trees would also have to be located on the island, skilled pit-sawyers would need to be hired, and the finished product would again have to be transported to Tracadie. He then went on to consider various places on the island that might have suitable standing trees that could supply both the timbers and the lumber, as well as craftsmen, working in his mind westwards from Tracadie through the various townships all the way to Malpeque. What is surprising is that at this early period when most of the island was still covered with old-growth forest, it is evident that for some places the wood required for building a house was not always at hand. And, though there were historical factors peculiar to Tracadie and the

‘38 ‘Couple' is another name for a roof rafter (Oxford 1989). ‘39 This involved two sawyers hand-sawing a log using the long ‘whip-saw', one sawyer down in the pit and the other on top of the log. (See Macphail (1939) for a description of the method.) MacDonald (1784) in his ‘lnstructions‘ envisaged two teams of sawyers comprising four men in all — he suggested the “French [living] at Malpec'. He considered that pit-sawing would have the advantage that “the Boards might be sawed of the exact length & thickness that the Carpenter would order, so that there would be less waste & refuse stuff than by geting them from Pict0u, and as they would be near at hand it might be very little dearer upon the whole than those from Pict0u would be with freight and refuse stuff".