> Subject: Re: Scotch Irish Farm Houses > Date: Sunday, November 14, 1999 3:28 AM > > 14 Nov 99, What are Scotch-Irish Farm Houses? Are they the clasical white > farm houses with the nice turned wood porches and trimins? Miles Caughey Hello Miles, In my reply to a posting on Noah and Louis Speer, I mentioned that the houses required in Belle Vernon were 2 story German square houses and Scotch Irish farm style houses. There are several styles of homes and barns that were common in the past. 1) The German square house with 4 rooms on the lower and upper floor with a hall way down the middle. My aunts house was an exception. It had an entrance way at the front corner of the house with its own stairway. The ceiling in that hallway must have been 25 feet high. In the back off the kitchen was a tight, steep spiral staircase going upstairs. You could bump your nose on the next step if you weren't careful. It was only one person wide! 2) The Scotch Irish farmers were particularly fond of the two story, one room wide and 3 rooms long house. In the country the porches were on the long side but in Belle Vernon and other towns the main porch is on the end toward the main street. The lots in BV are either 40 foot or 80 foot wide by about 115 (or 150?) foot deep. The 40 foot width lots were ideal for the Scotch Irish homes and the 80 foot wide were used with the German Square houses. Some of the Scotch Irish houses have small side porches. Most of the homes up North have basements but the ones down south usually have a crawl space. In the country, the farmers could expand on the "I" form of the house by making an L wing at one end or a T wing at the middle the same width and height as the main I section. 3) The newer common Ranch style has rooms only on one level. 4) The British cottage style has dormers in the attic for other one or two upstairs rooms. It has 4 or 6 rooms on the main floor. 5) The Southern or Louisianna "shotgun" house where if you opened the front door and backdoor you could shoot a shotgun through the house and not hit any walls. It was usually built on stilts. 6) The Split-Level home is also a newer variation of a Ranch utilizing a raised basement level for living. 7) Another variation of the Ranch which utilized the basement level was one where the front entrance way came in mid floor on the long side and had steps leading up to the 2nd main floor and down to the basement 1st floor level at the entrance hallway. Many of the houses originally had more than one chimney. When metal basement coal furnaces came along, the 2nd chimney on the front side was usually taken out like it was in my parents house - what a dusty mess! Many of the houses in BV had slate roofs until the invention of asphalt and fiberglas shingles. The roofs had to be strong enough to hold the stone roofs. Many of the immigrants started off living in the basement section of their homes since they couldn't afford the upstairs. Some of the basements ended up looking pretty nice. My friend's dad built a pretty nice looking house about the time my friend was in high school. There are several styles of barns too: 1) The impressive German barns in the north which took advantage of the sloped hillsides and had the main 2nd floor entrance on the uphill side. On the lower level was a forecastle or open area recessed along the entire lower side of the bottom floor which could give protection to cattle without them coming into the barn most of the time. They would be allowed in the lower floor in the winter time. 2) In the south, cattle did not have to come in in the winter time. The barns are a lot smaller and don't store much hay. There usually is no lower section or lower porch. But there is a drive through open section in the middle of the main floor usually with no doors but maybe a fench gate where farm equipment can be stored out of the weather. Tom Speers - formerly of Belle Vernon and now been down South longer than I lived up North. Yall have a nice holiday season.