Study of Puritan Housing in America
Study of Puritan Housing in America
In this easy I am going to write about the typical Puritan house, jails, and the scaffolds used for hanging criminals in Salem Massachusetts in the 1690’s. I will address the materials, preparation of the materials, design, and purpose of these structures.
First I would like the Puritan house in Salem. The houses were mostly wood from the local forests in the Salem area. The wood was set up in an interlocking method. In order to get them to interlock they would cut notches out of the wood and a glue type material was used to hold the logs together. They also used stones to even out the ground to build the houses on. The stones were held together by mortar as far as I can tell. The wood used on the houses look to be untreated logs from the local woods. As we all know the houses in this time were very simple there was no running water, no indoor plumbing, and no electricity making it very simple to build I would say it would take 2 or 3 days to build. These houses were built very well and most of them still stand today.
Secondly I would like to write about the jails that the puritans used to hold the criminals before hanging. The jails were made out of wood and iron bars. The cells were staked on top of each other. They stacked the cells about 3 cells high. There was as stairway so that they could get to all the cells. The wood used for the jails was from the local woods and the iron was probably imported. I think that the jails were built very oddly but they worked.
Last I am going to write about the scaffold that the people of Salem used to hang their criminals. The materials used to build scaffold was wood most of the wood used on the scaffold was prepared for special use like the top peace was in beam form to support heavy things like big people. This beam had a thick rope tied to it fog hanging the condemned people. This rope had to be thick in order for it not to break under great pressure. The posts holding up the beam were untreated the wood for this was probably cut down from the local woods....