Man-powered boulder loading

[oosik]

My EXACT thoughts Tractor Seabee. Regarding quicksandfarmer's basement foundation - - they hired a team of Egyptians.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

My EXACT thoughts Tractor Seabee. Regarding quicksandfarmer's basement foundation - - they hired a team of Egyptians.

Close.

My land has stone walls that were built when the property was settled by Europeans in the 1600's. But they weren't built by those settlers. This area was part of Plymouth Colony and was settled by Puritans. The Puritans were generally urban people, in England they concentrated around the book printing and binding business. They knew little about farming and weren't used to hard manual labor -- which was why they had a hard go of it for a long time. They had to hire people to do work for them -- and the only people around to be hired at that time were the Native Americans. So the walls were built by Native Americans, who were used to outdoor work and physical labor, and were happy to receive steel tools, guns and alcohol in return.

 

[Jstpssng]

My house was built circa 1850, it has a full basement with a fieldstone foundation. Some of the stones in it are twice the size of the ones in that picture. The largest is about six feet long*. Every time I'm down there I wonder how they got them there. I do know that the floor of the basement is at the original grade level, they built the wall and then filled around it to put the house up on a hill.

(*Around here we call a stone of that size "medium-sized." A "large" stone is one that is visible from space.)

I was in the cellar of my friend's farmhouse of similar vintage years ago. Not only was the foundation granite; but there was a huge granite slab supported by granite pillars, underneath part of the living room floor so that you could stand upright beneath it. He wasn't sure what the original purpose was, but suspected that there was once a fireplace on top of it.