,
5 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
If Swedes were as good at building colonies as they were at building settler's homes, America might have been Swedish speaking today. Here is a peculiar 1638 log cabin, built with cob and rock infill (chinking). 
A Dutch traveller, Jasper Danckaerts, describes these houses in what is today New Jersey, when he passed through the area in 1678:
Here is another 1640s Swedish log cabin in Darby Co, PA, which for some idiotic reason was demolished in the 1940s. Presumably the settlers built these in a hurry as 17th c Scandinavian log cabins are far better constructed without chinking or infill.
The English colonists were aware of how the Swedes built but they did not copy or learn from them and built their own homes differently, as described by Edward Johnson in 1654. The Dutch traveler Jasper Danckaerts considered these buildings awful and freezing cold in the winter.
As soon as the English could they'd build better homes and sell their first pit-bldg to newcomers, but even upgraded the new homes were fragile, draughty, vulnerable to hurricanes and far colder in the winter than the more sensibly built Swedish cabins. These are reconstructions.
