Architecture Association

Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 10:41 pm

Architecture Association
why did colonial American builders use clapboards to enclose the sides of their dwellings?

a) convenience of raw material
b)aesthetic preference
c)symbolic associations
d)echoing architecture of the past

D. American ingenuity made something new of clapboard. In England clapboard was used for barrels; the English who became Americans learned to apply it to houses.

The clapboard oak staves used to make English barrels were imported from the Baltic. But North America abounded with oak too, and the first cargo shipped from Jamestown back to England at the start of the settlement in 1607 included clapboard for this purpose.

In New England, also, the colonists made clapboards of oak. But after a few winters there, the English adventurers discovered another use for them. English houses were "half-timbered," with plaster filling the space between framing timbers. Half-timbering did not give enough protection from the fierce winters of New England, so for extra insulation the colonists clapped clapboard on the outside walls. We have a 1632 report of "a small house near the wear at Watertown, made all of clapboards."

The colonists soon learned to overlap clapboards and make them specifically for houses, with one edge thinner than the others. This style was so successful that it has remained in use to the present for all kinds of American housing, even where winter insulation is not needed.

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