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Mud and Wattle Chimney

Every family in that hollow kept a long forked pole standing by the door, and the rule about it was one of the first things a child learned. If the chimney catches, you do not fight it. You shove the whole thing away from the house. That chimney was built out of short split sticks, stacked up square like a little log pen and then plastered thick inside and out with clay mud. Cheap, quick, and something one man could throw up alone in a couple of days with nothing but a mattock, a creek bank and his own hands. If you were the first family on that ground, or you were renting, or you were young and starting with nothing at all, this is what you had. The trouble with it is obvious the moment you say it out loud. It is a wooden chimney. The clay is the only thing standing between the fire and the sticks, and clay dries, cracks and falls out. So the design carried an escape plan built right into it. The stack was set leaning very slightly away from the house and braced clear of the wall, so that when the daubing finally failed and the sticks caught, the family could get that forked pole into it and push the entire burning chimney over into the yard, and the house would still be standing when the smoke cleared. That is the part worth sitting with. Nobody was fooled. They knew precisely what they had built and precisely how it would fail, so they designed the failure in on purpose and stood the tool for it by the door. That is not ignorance and it is not carelessness. That is a family with no money making an honest trade and then preparing, in advance, for the bill. The daubing got gone over every spring and fall, and the bucket of water and the bucket of sand on the doorstone were not decoration either. Almost none of these survive, for reasons that explain themselves. But you can still find where one stood, because the clay ring stays in the ground for a very long time after everything wooden has gone back to dirt. ***** Note: Pretty good and pretty accurate but notice that the pole in the picture is not holding the chimney from falling and is not consistent with the comment, "The stack was set leaning very slightly away from the house and braced clear of the wall." Compare with the real picture at https://www.rumford.com/timberframe/images/loghsewattledaub.jpg

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