Heslet House

For as foggy as Melcher’s story was, Heslet’s is even more so. He had an article of agreement for the purchase of two lots from a Philadelphia liveryman who had purchased Melchoirs properties. He settled south of the Pittsburgh Beaver Road that passed through the lots along the base of a hill sometime before 1820. This was originally a military road built to connect the Continental Army outposts of Fort Pitt and Fort MacIntosh. Thirty years earlier, General Mad Anthony Wayne marched his army through here to a site he selected for Legionville, the first United States military post, the next hollow north from Heslet’s. The Harmonist map marks where a few settlers built their houses on either side of the road. If accurate, it shows one house per the lots they owned along the road, and even the number of rooms in each house. Heslet’s log house is on Lots 15 and 16 near Hazel Hollow.

Can you imagine riding your horse along the dirt road with a forest to your right up the hill and smallholders expanding their fields of corn and wheat on the slopes below as the sun glimmers off the Ohio in the distance? This is the sight David Shields must have seen as he later described to George Rapp writing that the land could be had for their new village. Shields and another agent were hired to acquire the lands. One letter tells of a problems with Heslet’s lot in that he was not the titled owner of record and that though they might not have to pay Heslet, there could later be claims made in Orphan’s Court by his heirs if they didn’t settle with both he and the Philadelphia property owner, which they did. And thus Heslet disappears from history.

But who was Samuel Heslet? The 1820 Census says that a man with three women lived there among three buildings. Were they man and wife with sister and mother, the record doesn’t say? Where he came from and where he went may never be known, but his house tells a lot of the man. He cut the trees down in the winter of 1821-1822, building it in 1822. Based on the study of log construction techniques, tree rings, and tradition, trees were selected for their straightness and lengths with few limbs. The logs would have been in a virgin forest and not an open field. Imagine, thirty foot plus tall trees so straight because they were like sprigs of grass competing for light in the virgin forest canopy leaving little room for side limbs. They were felled in the winter when the sap was down, but not left to dry. Anyone who’s ever felled a tree and hewn it knows that scoring and chunking a length of tree is very difficult, but even more so when it’s is dry. With little field work to do, squaring logs was winter work.

In hewing a log a chalk line is snapped along the length of the felled tree and the woodsman would work along the length cutting v-notches into the rounded sides up to the chalkline with a felling axe. He would then work back along the length with a flat-sided broadax cutting off the chunks of wood between the V-notches up to the line. This was done for the thirteen logs per side needed to make a two story house. Neighbors would have helped each other build their log houses. Samuel and his neighbors were skilled woodsmen. The broadax work of the house is so skillful that an esteemed expert in Harmonist history thought that the logs had been hand planed smooth, but that was just good axe work. The first log is a sill log flattened on three sides, with the top side still retaining its bark. Cathedral notches (not dovetails) were cut on the corners. Once the two sides were in position, the two opposing logs were rolled into place up along poles onto the first two sills. They were then marked and axe cut and test fitted until they had a tight fit into the first two corner notches. They had to be tight to keep out the weather and vermin. This went on until the top logs were all finally fitted. The chunks left over from notching were saved to use to fill the voids between the logs. A misconception is that the log work was so skillful the logs fit up tightly along their entire length. That’s a sign of a machine milled log, not fine hand work. Clay mud mixed with straw and sand was slung onto the chunking to create a weather tight seal with the chunking and the bark of the logs holding the mud. This process evolved into the term chinking. The roof rafters were then fitted into the top log and the gable ends fitted with vertical timbers to receive the horizontal clapboards.

Heslet was not happy after the land sale transaction to the Harmonists. He felt he did not get his due for the value of the crops he had planted. As strange as it sounds to our modern ears that it’s all about the value of the house, to someone who spent every day clearing a virgin forest of trees so he could plant some grain so he could eat, it becomes understandable that the crops had a real value. Three annual installments for the grain were finally agreed upon. But as he packed up to leave, the Harmonists descend on his house readying it to dismantle and move. The first thing they would have done is mark the logs. A hand fitted log only goes in one place, and one place only. Getting them mixed up would have been a costly mistake of re-hewing the corner notching over again that George would have frowned upon. So, someone with a chisel would have marked the logs from the bottom up with a Roman numeral, followed by from one to three slashes indicating the side of the house the log came from, and a tick mark indicating it’s position from left to right to show where the log had been fitted in a log cut for window and door openings. Once marked, the house would have been dismantled, loaded onto a skid or wagon, and taken to the building site.

The original site of the house is now heavily built over, so nothing is known of the first foundation and if there was a cellar. The Harmonists, though, set this house into a corner lot along a line of buildings that fronted their new Church and Uber Streets. As this part of town is an alluvial plane of river rock and sand, they dug down through the top soil one foot to the sand and laid oversized rough field stone up to ground level and on top of that cut stone one foot above to form a two-foot high stack of rock for the foundation. This was a common technique at the time. A bid specification for a log jail in Ohio describes the same stone foundation, but with added reinforcing to ensure for the safety and security of the inhabitant. Once the stone was laid the sill plate log was set and then it was just a matter of following the numbers.

Some say that’s the same way the Harmonist timber buildings were built, and that is correct in a manner. But in timber frame construction the timbers are hewn, or in the case of the Harmonists, sawn, mortised and tenoned and then test fitted into bents in a flat construction yard. A bent is equivalent to a modern truss, but includes vertical timber post. When complete, all the joints marked with rust from a chisel for reconstruction. The bents were then dismantled, and moved to the building site and reassembled. In the case of the Blaine house, across from the Heslet house, the same technique was most likely followed. But the difference is in the reassembly. The timber frame was set on a similar stone foundation, or a full cellar, and then assembled by the numbers. But that’s where the similarity to the Heslet house and the other logs houses moved here ended. George Rapp complains in a letter that he wishes his mansion was done so he didn’t have to ride into town every day from the manor where he was staying unlike the other Harmonist workers. He went on to note that he was pleased to see the cellar dug for his (the Blaine House) house and thought the cellar would make a fine powder magazine. So, it was still under construction while the workers were living in the houses moved from the Pittsburgh Beaver Road.

So, why were the workers on site every day, and he had to ride in? A log house can be re-assembled in a day, but once a timber frame is assembled, the lathing begins. Hand split lath had to be riven if the old lath wasn’t saved. Even today, this is misunderstood. Oak lath had to be hand split the length of a long bolt of wood, with the log first quartered and then split into smaller and smaller bolts until it was a long narrow strip of wood running along the grain of the wood for strength. It had to be green in order to firmly hold the small square lath nail that would split older dry lath, but it also had to be wet enough not to suck the moisture out of the new plaster mud. Lime plaster cures over months by absorbing carbon out of the atmosphere, not by drying. Though there’s limestone deposits here, the most readily accessible limestone for the Harmonists were outcroppings along the river. That’s why their lime kilns were near the river. It was arduous to break, crush, bake and slake the limestones into quick lime, the essential ingredient of lime plaster, so the Harmonists depended a lot on clay in their plastering. So while the purist of lime plaster required straw and hair to hold the keying (the wet lime plaster that squished between the lath) in place while it cured around the green lath, it was even more critical the high mud content in their plaster was not to be disturbed till the weaker lime content re-calcined - always a weak point in their construction, and a reason for any delays in occupying a brick or frame Harmonist house they built.

Heslet’s house was re-assembeled, with the roof framing reinstalled, shingled and the gable ends enclosed with Heslet’s old clapboards or weatherboards. The house was re-chinked with his old chunking and clay mud thrown onto the wood chunks and smoothed. It’s thought it was reassembled around April with some yet cold nights, with at least one chunk of wood pulled out of a fire as some are covered in carbon black. Later the Harmonist sided it in hand-beaded siding to protect the logs and chinking, and the interior whitewashed with lime. The Harmonist gave it their three-room floorpan, but retained the two outer chimneys with the four fireplaces instead of singular European-Style central chimney and two fireplaces as extant in the new Harmonist houses.

But evidence of Sam is still in the house if you look carefully. In the corner by his old front door, and by the second chimney, there’s remnants of pegs that were driven into holes bored into the logs that the Harmonist later broke off. The pegs held a simple wood plank shelf for the few domestic belongings of his household. And, if you look up you can compare his tightly fitted weatherboards in the gable ends of the roof to the Harmonist beaded siding. And then there’s his hewing of the logs. But, all we know is he packed up and rode away into history. There’s a Samuel Heslet who appears in the Wheeling area, the direction someone traveling along the river would have taken, who may be him or a relative, but that’s just a guess. He, along with the other settlers who led the way following the native Americans, the soldiers and frontiersmen and traders before them are lost to history, and a big part of the beginning of the new village of Eckonomie.