I think they did pretty much what Harvard University did recently in moving
3 19th-century buildings (you can probably find archival coverage on the
Boston Globe web pages):  jack them up and move them across town on
rollers.  This was done a great deal in both the 18th and 19th centuries; I
gather balloon framing lends itself to this sort of thing but  timber frames
less so.  Back in the day they didn't have to worry about overhead wires,
stoplights at intersections, and such.  I have visited properties that were
sort of sawed in half or at least divided up before moving, then re-joined
as it were vs. reassembled.  Anne Yentsch and Larry McKee wrote an article
many years ago about moving houses in 18th-century Annapolis, MD, and I
suspect that if you check the vernacular architecture literature (esp. the
journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Perspectives in Vernacular
Architecture) you would find some writeups on house moving.  And it is
possible that 19th-century newspapers in small towns covered house journeys
much as the press has done here for recent house and barn movings.  Today's
technology involves hydraulic jacks, cranes, and flatbed trailers, but house
moving has always been far more common than people think.

mcb

On 9/1/07, Claire Horn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi -
>
> I'm working on analysing front yard depositions of a site where the
> original house was built in the 1850s, then moved across town prior to
> construction of a 2nd, larger house around 1876.  Does anyone have an idea
> about how houses would have been moved around that time - i.e., taken
> apart piece by piece and reassembled, or moved whole?  We have a layer of
> very gravelly fill capping the original surface, and I'm wondering if the
> gravel could be related in any way to the house moving.  Not that we don't
> often find gravelly fill.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Claire Horn
> Public Archaeology Facility
> Binghamton, NY
>



-- 
Mary C. Beaudry, PhD, RPA, FSA
Professor of Archaeology & Anthropology
Department of Archaeology
Boston University
675 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215-1406
tel. 617-358-1650