Building a storage shed

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Foursquare and Stolid, These Buildings Were a Hardworking Adornment to the Colonial Backyard

by Michael Olmert

In a1930s photo, a brick smokehouse at Shirley Plantation. The cement stucco skinprotects the bricks from salt damage.

Summertime, in the eighteenth century, was notime for eating fresh pork. The oppressive heat that made quick work of humansin the Middle Atlantic colonies also turned the choicest cuts of meat intoPetrie dishes of corruption. The day a pig was slaughtered, it was cooked andeaten, often as part of a family celebration or for the arrival of importantvisitors. Leftover meat was quickly shared with neighbors or slaves.

A frosty month, especially December, was the proper time forpig butchering, salting, and smoking. It’s a tradition documented to medievaltimes. The illuminated manuscripts known as books of hours, prestige prayerbooks, often depict pig slaughtering on their calendar page for December, inthe same way that they show planting in March and harvesting in August. Killingthe winter pigs was just another part of the annual agricultural round.

If you expected to have pork all year long, you needed asmokehouse. From earliest times, a smokehouse was a small enclosed shelter, aplace in which a fire could be kept smoldering for a few weeks, which wouldonly slowly release its smoke, and in which the smoked meat could hang safefrom vermin and thieves.

Just about any sort of vernacular shed could serve. But anelegant Gothic one appears in a book of hours painted in France by theso-called Rohan Master about 1420. On the page for December, a pig is beingslaughtered, a wooden tub sits ready for the salted meats, and a fire has beenkindled in the little smokehouse. Not that all those necessary tasks are meantto happen on the same day.

In essence, you cure meat in two steps. The fresh cuts arepacked in tubs of coarse salt for about six weeks while the salt draws most ofthe water from the flesh. Then the salted meats are hung in a tightlyconstructed wooden shed, usually without windows or a flue, in which a firesmolders for one to two weeks. The result is dried, long-lasting,smoke-flavored meat that will age in the same smokehouse for two years beforeit’s eaten.

Smokehouses don’t show up in the documentary orarchaeological record of seventeenth-century Tidewater. If they’re smoking meatat Jamestown, they’re doing it in ephemeral sheds or barns, not inpurpose-built structures. Or the task may have been done as it often was inEngland, in smoking closets tucked away inside chimney flues. But since so verylittle remains of Jamestown above foundation level, it’s impossible to know forsure.

Colonial Williamsburg interpreter Barbara Ball butchers a hog in wintertime,the time a hog could be prepared for smoking without spoiling.

Thewinter slaughtering of a pig in a fifteenth-century book of hours. A smokehousewas the next destination for the meat.

By the first half of the eighteenth century, a new class ofbuilding is regularly appearing in the backyard landscape: the smokehouse,alternatively spelled “smoak” house. Typically, these are cubical structures ofwood, eight to fourteen feet square, with steep pyramidal roofs for holding inthe smoke among the hanging cuts of meat. It’s at this time that the word firstshows up in written records, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and Carl R. Lounsbury’s IllustratedGlossary of Early Southern Architecture and Landscape.

In 1716, there’s a mention of a smoak house on a plantationin York County, Virginia, the earliest known use of the term. A Hanover Countyplantation listed for sale in the Virginia Gazette on January 7, 1742, points to its”new fram’d Smoak-house, 8 Feet Square.” In 1732, “a Smoak house eight footsquare” with a “planked Dore,” is ordered for the glebe of Newport Parish, Isleof Wight County, Virginia. The sturdy door is to do with security. After thefires went out, the meat was stored in there. Poachers had to be kept at bay.

Everyone needed a smokehouse. At Colonial Williamsburg, ofthe eighty-eight original structures that survive, twelve are smokehouses. Andan additional fifty reconstructed smokehouses dot the backyards of the HistoricArea, many built atop the foundation footprints of likely smokehouses. At theGovernor’s Palace, the Wythe House, and the Peyton Randolph House,reconstructed smokehouses are still used to cure and flavor pork.

Sometimes a smokehouse is also called a meat house, whichmakes sense because the building spends much more of its time as a storagelocker than it does as a smoking house. In 1778, a house on Custis Square inWilliamsburg is said to come with a meat house. In Maryland, the phrase “meathouse” seems to be preferred over smokehouse. In Sussex County, Delaware,however, there was a farm with a meat house and a smokehouse, according to anOrphans Court valuation of 1812.

In Virginia, meat house is the exception. In the List ofWhite Persons and Houses taken in the County of Halifax, 1785, there arefifteen “smoak” houses and one meat house. This record is useful for looking atsmokehouse sizes: Of the fourteen Halifax structures the dimensions of whichare listed, five are twelve-by-twelve feet, five are twelve-by-ten feet, andthe rest are twelve-by-eight, ten-by-ten, eight- by-eight, and sixteen-by-sixteen. They must have seemed like near-perfect little cubes, part of animpressive parade of useful and well-made outbuildings in the colonialbackyards, the hallmark of a society that wanted to be seen as tasteful, wellmanaged, civilized.

A sense of how the smokehouse was made and used is plain inThomas Cooper’s report of what life was like on the ground in North America, ina book published in London in 1795. He’s describing the large plantation of oneArchibald M’Allister in Paxtang, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania:

Thesmokehouse is one of Colonial Williamsburg’s Peyton Randolph House outbuildingsthat have been reconstructed on the urban plantation. It was part of the”dirty” zone, separated by a fence from the clean area of the dairy andkitchen.

His smokery for bacon, hams, etc. is a room about twelvefeet square, built of dry wood a fireplace in the middle, the roof conical,with nails in the rafters to hang meat intended to be smoaked. In this case afire is made on the floor in the middle of the building in the morning, whichit is not necessary to renew during the day. This is done for four or five dayssuccessively. The vent for the smoke is through the crevasses of the boards.The meat is never taken out ’till it is used. If the walls are of stone, orgreenwood, the meat is apt to mould.

All this rings true and speaks to several designcommonplaces in historic smokehouses. Carl R. Lounsbury, an architecturalhistorian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, thinks the centrality of theheat source, a firebox in the middle of the floor, drives the building’s squareshape. And the sharply pitched roof is essential for containing heat and smoke.

Waterinside the meat is a problem. It spoils everything. Dried meat lasts longer.And so the heat and smoke are meant to drive off the water. “Some smokehouseshave a small square fire pit; some have bricks covering the floors; some haveplain dirt floors,” Lounsbury says. The more intricate the roofing timbers, themore places to hang meat. “Sometimes,” he says, “you find extra collar beams upthere. And we’ve seen all manner of pegs, nails, hooks, and chains for hangingmeat.”

The Peyton Randolph kitchen Barbara Ball rubssalt into a ham before smoking.

Interpreter Jim Gay ties a leather stringthrough a ham.

In the smokehouse, interpreter Rob Brantley hangs hams.

Interpreter Dennis Cotner checks for mold.

Another way of removing water is with salt. The job startsby working a mixture of twenty-five pounds of salt and two pounds of brownsugar deeply into every inch of the fresh meat. Two ounces of saltpeter areadded so the meat will retain its pinkish color. It’s a tough job that can onlybe done by hand.

At Colonial Williamsburg, the second Saturday of December isthe traditional day for salting pork. “After the hand salting,” says foodhistorian Frank Clark, “we dry pack the pork in tubs, forcing the meat andcoarse salt in as tightly as we can. Each tub has several large holes in thebottom for the ‘liquor’ to drain out into the dirt floor.” That liquor is theunusable and faintly-not-nice water drawn off by the salt. It’s dehydrating themeat, replacing water with salt. The tubs appear to be truncated half-barrels,resembling the wooden tub in the Rohan book of hours, a scene nearly sixhundred years old.

The colder the weather, the slower the liquid flows out ofthe meat. Still, after about six weeks in the salting tubs, the cuts are readyfor hanging over the smokehouse fire. At Colonial Williamsburg, the fire isusually kindled in February. Because the whole point is smoke, not flame, greenwood is used, though historically corncobs or fruitwood smoked well enough. AtShirley Plantation, whose smokehouse was last used in about 1953, apple woodwas burned, according to proprietor Hill Carter. It added a special sweetness tothe meat. Also at Shirley, the fire was allowed to burn untended day and night.It was relit every morning. “It wasn’t a disaster if it went out,” Carter says.

Typically, smoking would last about two weeks.The reconstructed Wythe smokehouse is so solid, its wallboards so tightlyfitted, it’s more like a piece of outdoor furniture. It holds in its smoke welland is the most efficient smokehouse in town.

The more vernacular smokehouse behind the Peyton RandolphHouse leaks profusely. In keeping with that backyard’s orientation, thesmokehouse uses two types of boarding on its four sides: sawn poplarweatherboards for the sides facing the house and more formal yard but riven oakclapboards for the sides invisible from the house. Wool has been stuffed into thecrevices between the irregular clapboards. With more oxygen getting inside thissmokehouse, its fire burns brighter and faster, but it loses so much smoke ittakes much longer to cure the meat.

More smokehouses were like the Peyton Randolph version thanthe Wythe’s. People who grew up around working smokehouses a half century agorecall the comforting sight of them in the landscape, puffing away at theirwintery task like steam engines.

Not that smoke is an unalloyed blessing. Inside an oldsmokehouse, the studs and walls appear black and shiny, like the oily-featheredback of a grackle, the layer of creosote deposited by years of smoke. And sincethe hams, shoulders, and bacons age inside the smokehouse for at least twoyears, they can be exposed to several more rounds of smoke. Creosote begins tocoat the meat. This may be why, at Shirley, cured meat was removed from thesmokehouse and rehung in the basement of the big house. “Some of it went threeto four years,” Carter says. “Some of it the rats got.”

Since insects, too, have a taste for bacon, the tighter thesmokehouse, the better. But some always managed to get inside. For them, thecured meat was coated with pepper, a natural insect repellent. Hickory asheswere another way of discouraging bugs.

A smokehouse that’s too tightly constructed can be trouble. Elevatedhumidity inside can lead to gray and green blooms of mold on the hanging meat.”You have to be careful about bright molds,” Clark says. “Bright greens orpurples can be nasty. The duller molds and the creosote can just be washed orcut off the meat. No harm done.”

Salt, though lovely for meat, is a problem for smokehouses.After a century or more of use, the wood cells of timber get infused with salt,which replaces their water, and the studs go all fuzzy and soft. Deep down thewood can be fairly competent, but the surface is pure Nerfball.

Brick smokehouses are especially threatened by saltintrusion. Lavishing the investment of bricks on a utilitarian building devotedto a smoky, almost industrial use was pure ostentation. Still, stunningexamples of brick smokehouses exist at Shirley, at His Lordship’s Kindness nearClinton, Maryland, at Reynolds’ Tavern in Annapolis, and at the Benjamin PowellHouse at Williamsburg, to name a few.

They’re unusual, if not quite rare, often plagued by saltintrusion that leaves the bricks and mortar friable. Decades of degradationhave given the bricks the rounded and insubstantial appearance of damp sugarcubes. The Powell smokehouse had gone so granular that hundreds of finches werepecking it away, either for the salt or for the tiny stone grains they use indigestion. The solution was to blot the building with seven applications of ashredded-toilet-paper poultice, which drew out thirty-eight pounds of theoffending salt.

Arecent photo of Shirley’s brick smokehouse.

The Powell Housesmokehouse in Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area.

At Shirley, the solution was to render the walls with acovering of cement stucco, a fix that was tried at the Powell House in the1820s but was removed in the restoration of the building in 1956. The Shirleystucco is still in place, still doing its job.

So what isit all about, this quest tounderstand smokehouses and to reconstruct them in believable ways that reflecteighteenth-century life? For Edward A. Chappell, director of architecturalresearch at Colonial Williamsburg, God is no longer just in the details.

“We won’t copy bits of a historic smokehouse for areconstruction,” Chappell says. “We try instead to understand the system: howand why and where this building was built, how it fit into a complex zone ofbackyard activities. Building details are helpful, but the relationship betweenbuildings is what’s most interesting. So we record the whole plan of thefarmyard during fieldwork, not just louvres and hooks and hinges.”

The reconstructed Peyton Randolph smokehouse is an exampleof an older building that got a facelift when the family began to transform itsproperty in the 1750s. Its clapboard sides, facing away from the house, wererefitted with more finished and expensive weatherboards.

“In time, we came to understand,” Chappell says, “that inthe Peyton Randolph backyard there was a palpable division of activity. Zone Awas for clean work; the dairy was there. Zone B was for more unsavory andindustrial work. And although the smokehouse is more or less balanced by thedairy, its door shouldn’t open into Zone A. There’s even a fence between thetwo zones.”

And so the door will be moved from the south to the northside of the smokehouse, opening into zone B, not into the cleaner zone, nearthe slaves working in the laundry and kitchen and the Randolph women makingbutter and cheese in their spotless dairy. It’s a change driven by newarchaeology and a clearer understanding of this particular backyard.

There was once a time when these zones, theseinterdependencies, defined people’s lives. There were always distinctionsbetween the field and the house, of course. But these new fences, these mutezones centered on the smokehouse and the other backyard outbuildings, they werethere too, a real part of the circle of common knowledge we are only nowuncovering. It was a world built on boundaries.

MichaelOlmert teaches English at the University of Maryland. He is compiling hisearlier stories that appeared in the journal—on ice houses, dovecotes,privies—into a book.

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