There's a whole "town" from the pre-Civil War 19th century on Long
Island in Bethpage, NY called "Old Bethpage Village" composed almost
entirely of houses moved there from around Long Island. They have some
interesting "re-enactments" (summer horse racing) and other events
there and an air-conditioned vistors center. I recall the
philanthropist Andrew Carnegie's baby rocker there in one of the small
houses...

Nearby the Grumman Co. started as a small machine shop in the "cradle
of aviation" and went on to build the Lunar Excursion Module, from
pieces manufactured in small machine shops all over Long Island I was
told by one of its organizers, so no one had the "big picture" until
after final assembly. They recently joined with Northrup and while
shovel testing "out east" saw the last two F-14s fly they had built.
Eighty (80) had been delivered to Iran, purchased by the Shah, and
over 4000 Grumman employees were once in Iran outside "Teheran" (old
spelling?) training their air force to be ready "Anytime, baby" (from
their shoulder patch). Grumman was once the single largest employer on
Long Island, about 25,000.

Some house moving, huh? To the Moon...

On 9/1/07, Mary C. Beaudry <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>