Sawmill houses

A few months ago I got asked if I'd help with a possible National Register nomination for a house located in the east Texas pine forests, a really nice example of vernacular construction and style. The house is one story on stone piers (probably loose laid, but I haven't taken a close look at them yet) with a hipped roof and a veranda that runs the full width of the facade. It's got the classic deep South windows, the ones that come close to being floor to ceiling in height, front door is centered and there's a stone chimney on each side wall. It's a style I always think of as Acadian, but I'm told is referred to as French Creole. It is, in fact, a considerably down-sized version of the plantation house in the photo -- same general concept with the deep veranda, the big windows, hipped roof, but all done a whole lot smaller and minus the attic dormers. It's an east Texas vernacular farmhouse, after all, not the remnants of a high-style plantation.

The style isn't the interesting thing about the house, though. What makes it potentially NR eligible is that it's sawmill construction, and still looks it. Sawmill construction is a technique that's only possible in situations where load-bearing walls aren't going to be supporting a whole lot of weight. An alternative name for the technique is box construction. Putting it as simply as possible, there are no wall studs. As the above photo of the interior of the Klepzig Mill illustrates, there's a stringer at the top, a stringer at the bottom, and sometimes a stringer across the middle, but no vertical studs. The walls are nailed to each other at the corners. What you're seeing when you look at the vertical planks is the backside of the exterior wall. From the outside it looks like this:

The gaps between the vertical planks would be covered with battens. The technique was widely used across the South. It was fast, it was easy, it was cheap. Lumber companies often built dozens of sawmill houses for use as lumber camps or company towns as a cheap, temporary solution for workers needing housing; settlers moving into rural areas to farm used the same technique for similar reasons. Ozark National Scenic Riverways has three examples I'm familiar with: the Klepzig Mill building and springhouse (interior pictured below) associated with the Klepzig farm, and the Suzie Nichols cabin. Although the written descriptions of sawmill construction always talk about it being a 19th century transition between log cabins and balloon or platform framing, the OZAR structures are all twentieth century.

The house in east Texas in some ways is a totally typical sawmill house, while in others it's rather unusual. Among other things, it still looks like a sawmill house -- it has the original board and batten exterior. I've no doubt Sabine County had quite a few others like it built around the same time, using the same floor plan and materials, but they're all either long gone -- razed because they were too small and too old-fashioned -- or so thoroughly covered up with aluminum or vinyl siding that they're now unrecognizable.

I'll be back in east Texas next week. Here's hoping the house still looks as eligible the next time I see it as it did eight months ago.