In the nineteenth century, women, who were uprooted from
their families and hauled into primitive conditions, had to make due with the
housing structures their husband’s provided.
Their first home once they arrived to their location could
be a tent, a one room log cabin with no
doors or windows or floor, mining shacks with dirt floors and canvas ceilings,
flimsy tar-paper shacks, dark and desolate dugouts or soddies. The men were
busy staking claims, putting in crops, or working jobs and only came home to
sleep. The manner of the house didn’t matter to them.
But the woman spent every hour of every day in the home
other than the hours her chores took her outside. Reading letters by some of
the pioneer women it is easy to see how their dreary conditions would be hard
to handle. Especially if they had
several children in a small drafty, leaky home.
One woman used grass and fern mixed with mud to fill the
cracks in the walls and floor to keep out the drafts, vermin, lizards, and
snakes. Many of the floors had cracks so large the eating utensils would fall
through the cracks and the boards would have to be pried up to retrieve the
tableware.
Another family decided to move to a larger parcel of land
and to save time of building another house, they pulled the 12’ x 12’ chicken
coop to the new site. Before she could get her things moved in pack rats
dragged in their sundry plunder. They
cleaned out the debris and the rats and lived in the building with five
children. The woman didn’t like the gray
walls and smell of chickens so she covered the walls with newspapers. Later the family moved into a more permanent
living quarters. This building had a ceiling made of muslin tacked up to the
plaster. When it rained hard the muslin would hang down with mud in it,
dripping dirty water on everything. After every rain they would have to take the
muslin down and wash it. She whitewashed the walls and as the family became
more prosperous she bought calico cloth, sewed it together and tacked it to the
walls. The one front room window had a cheese cloth curtain she attached
crocheted lace to. When she desired a
nicer place for her babies to play than the rough plank floors, she spent a
winter making a carpet from rags. She even went to the dump and dug out flour
sacks that she died a dull brown using copper.
One woman sewed sheets together to tacked them up between the
joists of the cabin to make the home more cozy and less drafty. A woman married
to a civil engineer, used his geological survey maps to line her walls.
In South Dakota there were the “tar paper homesteaders”.
These people had the choice of lining their interior walls with red or blue tar
paper. The red was thinner and cost three dollars a roll while the blue was
thicker and six dollars a roll. Everyone knew the difference in quality and
cost so the blue paper on walls became a sign of class on the frontier.
Source: Pioneer Women; The Lives of Women on the Frontier by
Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith