Until the 1830s, domestic architectural styles in North America were heavily influenced by European styles. The log cabin of the frontier came from Sweden, brought by settlers to the Swedish colony of Delaware in the 1630s. The typical residence in Colonial cities was heavily influenced by the standard British house of the time. No doubt there were some uniquely North American touches, but on the whole, the North American style of building houses was an adaptation of European construction methods.
Two factors made building different in North America. One was an abundance of wood. Wood was used at a rate impossible to match in a mostly deforested Europe. The other was the fact that labor was scarce in most communities. [A] European houses built in the traditional timber-frame style used heavy cut stone. [B] That took a huge toll in labor. [C] Another key feature of European houses was the use of heavy timbers fitted with complex joints. [D] Wooden pegs were used instead of iron nails. This type of home construction was time-consuming and required a team of expert carpenters and other workers with specialized tools. Fundamentally, it was the same method of building homes that had been used in Europe since medieval times.
In 1833, while constructing houses in Fort Dearborn, Illinois, Augustine Taylor, a builder from Hartford, Connecticut, invented a new method of building that utilized a framework of lightweight lumber. This was the birth of the "balloon-frame house." This type of house could be built in under a week by two or three careful workers who could saw in a straight line and hammer a nail. Almost overnight, home construction changed from a specialized craft into an industry.
Skeptics predicted that the first strong wind would send a balloon-frame house flying off its foundations and into the air, and at first, balloon-frame was a term of scorn. In fact, these houses were more like woven baskets than like balloons. They were light, flexible, and yet very sturdy.
Balloon-frame houses required huge amounts of machine-planed lumber. This demand was met by improved sawmill technology that could quickly cut boards to standard sizes. They also required enormous numbers of machine-made nails. These were provided by recently developed automated nail-making machines. After 1800, the cost of nails in the United States steadily dropped, and by 1830 one could buy a five-pound bag of nails for pennies, less than the tax alone on a bag of nails in Europe.
The balloon-frame design first caught on in Chicago, Illinois. In the 1830s, that city established itself as a new gateway to the West. And with a mushrooming population came a soaring demand for housing. Because they could be built so quickly, most new houses were balloon-frame houses. Another advantage of balloon-frame houses was their mobility. Today, houses are seldom moved, but Chicagoans in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s took advantage of the mobility of lightweight balloon-frame structures without utility connections. New arrivals could buy homes and then move them to more desirable locations. Chester Tupper, Chicago's first house mover, moved thousands of homes on rollers through Chicago's unpaved streets. The downside of balloon frame houses was that they were made almost exclusively of flammable materials. Chicago rapidly became a city of wood. That fact came back to haunt the city on a hot, terrible night in 1871.
This building method spread from Chicago to the cities, towns, and farms of the American and Canadian West, where new settlers needed shelter in a hurry. Always ready to supply a new product, Chicago provided settlers with prefabricated kits for building balloon-frame structures. The Lyman-Bridges Company sold buildings of "any size or style, in any number, on short notice." Shipped by rail, the building kits contained milled lumber, roofing shingles, windows, doors, and building plans. The smallest house offered by the company was a one-room house measuring 10 by 12 feet (3.3 by 4.0 meters), while the largest had eight big rooms as well as a pantry, several hallways, and four closets. Prices ranged from $175 for the smallest model to $3,500 for the deluxe model. These reasonable prices allowed many workers the luxury of owning their own homes, in contrast to Europe where traditional construction techniques kept the rates of home ownership low for most of the nineteenth century. Balloon-frame housing remained the dominant style of home building in North America until the 1940s.
*sawmill: a factory that cuts trees into lumber (boards) for building
