The most common form of shelter for early miners in many states was the log cabin. In forested regions, logs were readily available and enabled miners to build reliable shelter in relatively short time. The following photos show many examples of these early cabins and the proud miners that built them.
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Between doing research on both mining camps and gold claims, I've run across a fair number of cabins or sites and the one thing that always amazed me was just how damned tiny they were.
I know smaller spaces take less effort to build and has less room to heat, but damn..... the huge majority of them took up less area than my little shed and in the ones that had walls still standing, there usually wasn't room for a man even back then to stand up straight without cracking his head. Many of them I'd have to bend over at the waist just to get through the entry.
What's even more amazing is that sometimes the cabin would be called home by 2 or 3 or 4 miners and all their gear.
When I'm working on the road, I prefer to stay in cheap short term residence motels so as to avoid long term leases and moronic landlords. On one contract some years back, the rooms at this dump were about 20 by 20. The room next to me was being rented by a landscaping company, and was filled with at least 12 adults and lots of kids, all illegals.
ReplyDeleteOn my last assignment, the rooms were about 10 feet wide and 15 feet deep. Two rooms down from me were 3 families, total about a dozen. All illegals, working for the turkey processor near Gettysburg.
The entry was small also for the purpose for fending attacks; small surface area but also anyone entering would be crouched, be in awkward position to mount an attack.
ReplyDeleteSmaller spaces are easier to heat but the same amount of labor is required to build as a larger space. The difference is not in labor but in materials.
There wasn't a lot of danger of attack in the town of Masonic Mining District where I found a lot of those cabins, seeing as it boomed in 1912, nor in the Mother Lode during the Gold Rush because the region was inhabited by digger Indians who weren't warlike at all.
DeleteI'm thinking the smaller cabins came from a) a lack of material to build with and b) they were in a hurry to get to prospecting and shelter was second on their list of priorities.
You also have to take into account people were a lot smaller in the past.
ReplyDeleteNot that much smaller than I am now. Average height back then was about 5' 6" and I stand only 4 inches taller.
DeleteThanks. Always good to read articles that expand ones knowledge of days gone by.
ReplyDeleteQuestions, when you were researching old claims, were any of them still active or all abandoned? Did you then find their locations and do some prospecting at those sites? Any ever yield?
Nemo
Answers: I never found any that were still occupied, most were either completely down or in the process of collapse. I never found any that had roofs on them - rafters and supports, yes, actual roofs or shingles, no.
DeleteMost of the cabins I found were on the eastern slope of the Sierras and that's hard rock mining country. I was a placer miner and know next to nothing about gold extraction from ore, so I didn't do any mining in that area.
If I found a cabin or cabin site in the Mother Lode in the western foothills, I'd check around the walls or debris for nails. If they were square nails, I'd work the area and usually did some good. If they were round nails, I'd move on because round nails came into common use after 1912 and their presence told me the cabin was probably built by Depression era miners, and if they took the time to build a cabin on the claim, they usually cleaned it out pretty good, so I wouldn't waste my time there.
Little known fact: There were more miners and prospectors in those hills trying to make a living during the Great Depression than there were during the Gold Rush years.
If you ever want to read up on that, find a book titled Bacon and Beans in a Gold Pan, written by one of those Depression era miners.
I prefer log homes. I bought one in 1990 and was hooked. Lots it in a divorec. A few years later I built one, 1,800 sq ft and just bought a cypress 1,500 but also has 1,000 in screened in porch. It's beautiful, twenty years old and we love it. Something you don't see much are cord wood homes. Stacked wood with two seams of concrete on either end. It was once called a poor mans home so people covered them with siding. Up in Canada, and probable other places, in the sixties/seventies people started renovating these homes and unbeknownst to them found the cord wood under the siding. They ripped off the sideing and restored it to it's grandure. My brother built a cord wood barn out of cedar. A big one. It's beautiful. I sure enjoyed the article too.
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