Some years ago Ted Reinhart dug a really neat site in Southampton Co, Va. which
had apparently had cob wall construction. Of course slave cabins in the Caribbea
n
and the carolina lowcountry were often "mud huts."
 
Dan
 
Paul Courtney wrote:
 
> Could this be what we call cob in britain a mixture of clay, straw and horse
> dung. It certainly survives in Britain's wet climate if properly maintained
> and was common vernacular technigue in the medieval & early-modern period in
> many clay areas, though not normally associated with status buildings. It also
> occurs as infill in timber framed houses.
> paul courtney, Leicester Uk
>
> ned heite wrote:
>
> This morning, I was reading the 1804 assessment for Mill Creek Hundred, New
> Castle County, Delaware, when I saw something startling, to say the least.
> Most of the houses in the hundred were stone, or log, or sometimes brick.
> Three were listed as mud-walled. What is a mud-walled house doing in
> temperate, humid, rainy, wet New Castle County in 1804. In all three cases,
> the inhabitants of these mud-walled houses were substantial, one of them a
> farmer with more than 200 acres.
>
> Turf or sod springs to mind. How else can one intepret this?
 
 
 
--
Dan Mouer
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology
Virginia Commonwealth University
http://saturn.vcu.edu/~dmouer/homepage.htm