"There are two quarters that I used to visit with my grandmother when I
was a little boy. The boss's house was built so that he could stand on
the porch of his house and see anything on the place, even in the slave
quarters. The houses were all built out of logs. The roof was put on
with what they called rib poles. They built the cable and cut each beam
shorter than the other. They laid the boards across them and put a big
log on top of them to weight them down, so that the wind couldn't blow
the planks off. They were home-made planks. They didn't have no nails.
They had nothing but dirt floors.
"Where the men folks were thrifty when they wanted to, they would go out
at night and split the logs into slabs and then level them as much as
they could and use those for floors. All the colored folks' were split
log floors if there were any floors at all. There was no lumber then.
The planks were made with whipsaws and water-mills. I was a grown man
before I ever saw a steam mill. The quarters that I saw were those that
were built in slave time.
"If cracks were too big, they would put a pole in the crack and fill up
the rest of it with mud--that is what they called chink and dob. The
doors were hung on wooden hinges. They would bore a hole through the
hinge and through the door and put a wooden pin in it in place of
screws. There wasn't a nail or a screw in the whole house when it was
finished. They did mortise and tenon joints--all frame houses. Where we
use nails now, if they had to, they would bore a hole and drive in a
pin--wooden pin."