Both Native Americans and European colonists designed and constructed a vast array of structures in North America. In the early 17th century, for example, the Huron and Iroquois Indians typically lived in longhouses, which they built by stretching mats or bark over a wooden frame. Some houses were as large as 100 feet in length and sheltered multiple families. The Algonquin inhabitants of much of the East Coast often lived in wigwams, which they made by lashing saplings together into circular or rectangular frames and sheathing them with grasses, reeds, or woven mats. Meanwhile, the Native residents of the desert Southwest and the Pacific Northwest designed considerably different dwellings and meeting houses.
White colonists brought designs and techniques from Europe that they adapted to the climate, topography, available building materials, and skills of local artisans in North America. The earliest colonial buildings in the New World often were crudely and quickly constructed while lands were cleared for cultivation. Coarse “earthfast” structures appeared in all regions. They lacked foundations, chimneys, or window glass, and, like some Native analogues, were built of posts driven into the ground and covered in mud plaster, roughly split boards, bark, or thatched mats. Indeed, in New England some of the first colonial houses were described by the Algonquin word wigwam, and in Manhattan as late as the 1620s shelters were characterized as square cellars covered with sod roofs. The earliest Quaker settlers in Pennsylvania initially lived in caves.
An 18th-century two-story log cabin, with less than 900 square feet of living space (Library of Congress)
World History
