32 C O N T E X T 1 3 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 4 NATHALIE SORENSEN The movable house A Canadian family has preserved an early example of the build-by-numbers approach to house construction, built in around 1778 to house soldiers during the American War of Independence. My husbandWilfred and I have three grown sons and three grandchildren. He is an inventor and I am a retired college teacher.We have lived most of our lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, a small city at the juncture of Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence River. In the spring of 1983 we knew it was time to build a weekend house on our rural property northwest of Kingston, an old farmstead of 100 acres about equally divided on both sides of the Salmon River, which runs through it diagonally from north to south. We had not been able to settle on a plan when our eldest sonMark called to say there was a house being torn down in Kingston which looked to be very old. Did we want to buy it from the demolition contractor?The house had been lived in until just before the demolition, and the wooden posts and beams of its structure looked solid, so we said yes. The size and simple plan of the house suited our needs perfectly. It was two-and-a-half storeys, occupying a footprint of 20 by 30 feet, built on a simple plan.The price was certainly right.The contractor sold the structure to us as used lumber, delivered to our site. We realised on further research that what we had was for Canada a very old house indeed, one of the oldest in our district. It was originally built on Carleton Island, one of the Thousand Islands in the St Lawrence River, south-east of Kingston by the British around 1778 to house soldiers stationed in Fort Haldimand during the American War of Independence. In April 1783, on the signing of the peace treaty, all work on Fort Haldimand ceased and preparations were made to move some of the houses to Kingston to accommodate the United Empire Loyalists who were flooding north into Upper Canada. The house was a post-and-beam construction, posts fully two storeys high with three sets of eight heavy beams holding up the three floors, and rafters holding up the roof.There are eight frames at four foot four inch centres, making seven bays. Before being dismantled, the posts, beams, and rafters of the house were carefully marked with Roman numerals to aid in the reconstruction. The original chimney was left on Carleton Island. The houses were taken apart and transported across the water and reassembled in Kingston in the summer of 1783. The outer walls of the house as it was rebuilt in Kingston were constructed of the 8 x 9 posts with an infill between the columns of 1 x 7 split cedar boards laid flat in thin beds of mud mixed with straw and anchored at the columns by 1 x 1 stops at each side – a variation of the ‘tamped clay and salt-marsh hay’ technique.The interior and exterior walls were plastered over with the mud and marsh hay mix. The outer face was covered in clapboard.The inside of these walls was simply plastered directly onto the cross-hatched mud. Inner partitions were 4 x 6 studs with split cedar lath The house as it is today, rebuilt on the Sorensens’ land on the Salmon River.
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