On decentring ethnicity in buildings research: The settler homestead as assemblage

New Iceland – Assembling houses at Víðivellir

The vast majority of houses in New Iceland were built of wood (Ledhowski and Butterfield, 1983). The knowledge of how to fell trees and prepare logs for building – squaring logs or carving out saddle notch joints – was foreign to settlers whose native country was virtually treeless. Homesteading therefore was caught up with acquiring new skills which lent itself towards the cementing of ties between neighbours, often across ethnic or national boundaries. Following a pattern familiar to western Canada, the first dwelling that Jón Guttormsson, Pálína Ketilsdóttir and their young son Vigfús occupied on their homestead was a log cabin. However, against the grain of western frontier history – where the pioneer as accomplished axeman hued his cabin from the forest – we know that John Ramsay, a local Cree man, was in fact its builder; the dwelling having previously been his family home. Ramsay is widely credited for teaching the incomers new carpentry skills; skills which can be likely traced to earlier intercultural relations within the fur trade history of the region, notably through connections with the Metis who erected log cabins in the Selkirk colony in the 18th and 19th centuries (Burley et al., 1992). Guttormur Guttormsson, Jón’s son, recalled Ramsay instructing his father how to make walls wind- and draft-proof by mixing hay and mud (Guttormsson, 1975). Similarly, he reportedly taught Ólafur Björnsson’s father, another neighbouring settler from Iceland, how to construct a log house for his family (New Iceland Heritage Museum Poster, n.d.).

The Guttormssons moved out of the house built by Ramsay in 1878 when they erected a new home: a more commodious one-and-a-half storey structure. Later in the 1880s, the Guttormssons extended their living space again though the addition of a second one-and-a-half storey log addition. Together, they formed a double gabled log house. The log house was abandoned in 1916 after the family built a new frame house elsewhere on the property. The new house had many hallmarks of ‘modern’ 20th-century design. It was substantially larger than the log house, it had several bedrooms, a separate dining and living area, as well as plumbing. The plans of the house were from the Eaton’s mail order catalogue, but the building material, like the houses before it, was local: lumber from their own property and local mills, while hardware came from local merchants.

This brief overview of the homestead at Víðivellir from the 1870s to 1960s hints at the fact that the business of homesteading was not a straight forward matter of design transfers from the homeland with a few necessary amendments. It was a historically contingent and creative process of assembling different ideas and materials that were intimately related to the geographies and biographies of place: to the geographical affordances of the farm, the biography of the family, its community relationships and the broader history of settlement in New Iceland and Manitoba more generally.

Let us have a closer look at the Guttormssons’ second home: the double gabled log house (Figure 4). The similarity of this structure to the more general form of gabled turf house common in Iceland in the 19th century has not gone unnoticed by scholars (Figure 5). Indeed, a photograph of the home from the Provincial Archives of Manitoba has been reproduced and used as an example of a ‘design transfer’ between old and New Iceland (Dowsett, 1984; Ledhowski and Butterfield, 1983). However, rather than simply being an example of an ethnic house type, the gabled log house is a clear illustration of the punctuated gathering of different skills, material, knowledge and ideas materialized in a dwelling. Its association with an ‘Icelandic identity’ combined with its diverse social and material connections makes it appropriate for our analysis. OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 5.

Late 19th-century turf house from Iceland (Ágústsson, 1987: 187).

To organize our discussion, we arrange the various entities in the assemblage onto two axes: a spatial and a temporal one. On the spatial axis, we break down the house into its constituent material parts: logs, windows, shingles, siding, insulation; not to mention the environmental conditions it was situated in. We consider how such materials, the ‘know how’ required to transform them and the social relationships implicated in acquiring these things were brought together at the farm. Along the temporal axis, we arrange the parts of the building in the order of when they were assembled and link those events to associated changes in the household and the wider community. In so doing, we demonstrate how the building – as assemblage – was never ‘finished’ but developed as its constituent parts changed: as rooms and windows were added, as insulation failed and as the family grew and experienced loss.

The spatial axis – The geography of the house

Thinking about building materials and skills as elements that have to be gathered from different places and people shows how the log house is made up of an assemblage of land, river, people and other things. In effect, it is implicated with a physical and human geography that both conditioned and enabled not only the creation of a dwelling, but through the process of assembling, the creation of a range of social relationships. An investigation into these aspects brings forth significant narratives such as the establishment of friendships and business ventures at the heart of the settlement process.

The logs for the first building the Guttormsson family erected at Víðivellir were cut on the land, squared and dovetailed by Jón. While some of the skills needed for constructing the house arrived with the settlers from Iceland, others were learned along the way and still others honed on the building site through the help of locals. For example, while Jón learned to handle a Candian axe and how to fell trees in lumber camps in Ontario, where the family stayed briefly prior to arriving in Manitoba, the skills of squaring and dovetailing were likely attained from indigenous neighbours (as previously discussed) and those government officials charged with assisting the Icelandic colony. In this way, the geographic reach of the building, its spatial axis, highlights the migration journeys of its builders and how skills are learned and expanded on in a mutually dependent way with the physical and social environment rather than being stored as fixed cultural capacities, which could be called upon when needs arose (cf. Hallam and Ingold, 2007).

The farm was situated in township 23 4E, which was surveyed in February 1877. It was described as undulating with poplar, brush and scattered spruce of good quality for building (PAM GR 1601 675). An abundant supply of good timber was almost certainly an important consideration for the Guttormssons in their homestead selection, enabling the relatively rapid construction of buildings and most importantly shelter. The location of the farm on the banks of the White Mud River (later the Icelandic River) was also a significant factor and one that the settlers recognized. Its sinuous nature dictated that the land was not surveyed into the conventional square homesteads but rather elongated ‘river lots’, which extended out from the river bank, allowing more settlers to claim water frontage (see Figure 6). This not only aided the drainage of boggy ground but gave access to an important means of transport. The river was a crucial participant in the creation of the homestead, affording certain possibilities while placing restrictions on others. Not only did its physical qualities matter, its width and depth for example, but also its entanglement (cf. Hodder, 2012) with other entities that were dependent on it, such as sawmills and the people who travelled along it; these among other ‘things’ contributed to the double gabled Guttormssons’ dwelling house as we demonstrate below. OPEN IN VIEWER

The squared and dovetailed spruce logs, which made up the walls of the log house at Víðivellir, were fashioned on the homestead; however, the house was not habitable until other materials had been sourced and inserted into the growing edifice. Lumber was needed for the floors, siding and roof, windows for light and ventilation, tar paper for insulation as well as nails, hinges and miscellaneous hardware. Although there are accounts of men and women walking to Winnipeg from New Iceland for trade, large and fragile merchandise such as glass windows were almost certainly transported by boats from the city, while lumber and roof shingles were likely bought from a local sawmill. In fact, the Icelandic colony’s paper, Framfari, announced on 13 July 1878, the year the Guttormssons built their house, that three men from the River Settlement had gone to the mill at Big Island to acquire wood for building (Framfari I (32), 24 July 1878: 316).

The sawmill on Big Island, located inside the Colony (Figure 3), was run by an English speaking settler one Mr Hargrave. The settlers from Iceland, who homesteaded on the island, appear to have been in constant disputes with Hargrave over wages for work they undertook at the mill and timber rights for their own homesteads (see e.g. Framfari II (5), 30 November 1878: 408). On one occasion, a disagreement culminated in Hargrave taking ‘ownership’ of logs the settlers had felled for the purpose of building a church for the community, which caused further animosity and complaints (Framfari II (7), 23 December 1878: 421, 429). Quarrels such as this remind us that laying claim to ‘wilderness’ was fraught with unanticipated outcomes. Here, assumptions about what constituted ownership could be slippery, particularly where regulations were still embryonic and unenforceable, meaning that building in a new land was also bound up with considerable social and political complexities. Rights to timber and the access to the skills and means to transform trees into squared logs or lumber was dependant on the navigation of government regulations and the establishment of successful business and or neighbourly relationships with others, often across barriers of language or culture. These relationships were materialized on the settler’s homestead as logs, sawed lumber and siding.

While the proximity to the river was convenient for moving building materials, it also placed certain demands on how a log structure was built, namely its foundation, which required raised cribbing, as advised by its previous owner John Ramsay. This is a clear example of how the environment directly affected the building’s design and how successful landscape learning could be rapidly acquired through relationships with others; in this case, members of the local indigenous population. The cribbing proved its value the following winter in 1879 when the river burst its banks. While the cow byre was completely inundated and the hay ruined, the family managed to save the cows by putting them in the downstairs room of the house while they stayed upstairs (Guttormssons’ Family Memoirs, n.d.). Following the flood, many of the settlers migrated out of the colony in an event that is recalled as the great exodus (Gimli Saga, 1975: 25).

In an effort to revive the Colony’s fortunes two of its leading members, Friðjón Friðriksson and Sigtryggur Jónasson, established a sawmill on the Icelandic River. The establishment of the mill provided newcomers on the river with a place to sell timber cleared from their homesteads as well as opportunities for wage labour. This enterprise was made possible by the unusually high water levels in the first years of the colony, which made navigation of the river with log barges possible. The storminess of the winter of 1878, high water levels and the exodus were the catalysts for the business enterprise, which in turn gave the Guttormssons not only the means but also the access to materials to expand their house in the early 1880s. The river conspired with the colony’s entrepreneurs to ensure the viability of the settlement along it. Fridriksson, who was a resolute supporter of the Icelandic colony and of his compatriots in the New World, discussed the plans for the sawmill in letters to his friend, and it is clear that although the promise of profit guided the businessmen they felt a moral duty to direct their capital to the betterment of their fellow immigrants (PAM MG8/A6-7). Bonds of culture and history – their Icelandic identity – created a sense of a common purpose amongst the settlers. Indeed, so committed were they to the success of the community the placement of their sawmill business could be said to be almost philanthropic in its intention to spur ‘Icelandic’ development. Ethnicity in this way came into play in the assembling of houses along the river, while this lived sense of identity politics had little impact, if any, in determining the physical character of their homes.

The mill opened in 1880; alongside it, the owners ran a general store. The store facilitated trade in the colony and provided settlers access to a variety of goods, effectively extending their geographic reach by connecting homespun creations with distantly produced mass-consumed products. For their work at the mill or for produce they sold to the store, such as potatoes or hay, the settlers could buy moose meat and rabbit skins (supplied by native trappers), imported goods like tobacco and coffee and necessary building materials, such as tarpaper and window panes, to amend, maintain and extend their houses. The establishment of the sawmill also had the obvious benefit of providing a local source of lumber for construction.

Whether the shingles for the roof of the first Víðivellir log house came from Hargrave’s mill on Big Island or from merchants in Winnipeg, Jón is said to have sold his watch, ‘a quality timepiece from Iceland’ to be able to pay for them (Guttormssons’ Family Memoirs, n.d.). His financial limitations were solved in part by the establishment of the mill on the Icelandic River, presumably giving the family the opportunity to expand their home. The enterprise employed Jón to load barges, transport logs and keep horses. According to the mill’s accounting ledger, Jon provided over 1200 hours of labour over two years, for which he was paid $248.43. To supplement these earnings, he sold the shop potatoes, hay and cord wood (Icelandic Collection, Friðriksson and Jónasson Store Ledger).

The gathering of materials and skills required to raise the building was an ongoing process throughout the life of the dwelling. Leaks had to be mended, window panes replaced, floors cleaned and walls plastered. Maintaining the things that composed the farm therefore ensured that multiple and varied geographies were entangled within its history. Never was there a point in time when the building was finished, when all the required materials had been gathered and the assembling came to a halt. As an example, we know that the tar paper insulation was not very efficient; wallpaper was needed as an additional barrier from the elements and cord wood was forever in demand for heating purposes. Guttormur’s children recalled hoar frost on exposed nails and windows in the winter and being instructed on particularly cold days to remain upstairs where it was warmer (Guttormssons’ Family Memoirs, n.d.). And while the sash windows provided light and ventilation, opening them over the summer months when the mosquitoes were a constant plague may not have been a feasible option. As if in response to this problem, in one of his reminiscences Guttormur regrets the late arrival of insect screens at the farm. It was partly because of the problem of insulation from the elements that the log house was later demolished and replaced by the Eaton’s catalogue home.

The temporal axis – The biography of the house

A photograph of the double gabled log house (Figure 4) is a snapshot in time and is therefore ill-suited to capturing the temporality of the building, which was maintained, repaired and augmented as it matured and was lived in. We can, for example, see a broken window pane in the left hand side upstairs window, which when replaced would have become the ‘youngest’ part of the building. Dividing the assemblage into phases of activity, where one part precedes another, is therefore done for convenience and throughout such discussion it is important to remember that a building project is never finished but ongoing as the house is lived in. The Guttormsson homes at Víðivellir are related to the lived, embodied experiences of their inhabitants and how the outside world impinged upon them. More than a result of their ethnic affiliation, the buildings are deeply entangled with the life history of the family – through times of growth, maturity and loss – and its relationship with the materials that would constitute the various forms of their home through its own phases of alteration, expansion and dilapitation (cf. McFadyen, 2013).

The building on the left is the earliest part of the house, built in 1878 to accommodate the arrival of Jón and Pálína’s second son, Guttormur. The house stood on the farm for 26 years during which it experienced various cycles of transformation. The most significant recorded change was when a parallel log home was built adjacent to the original structure, connected by a corridor, giving the building a strong resemblance to Icelandic 19th-century turf house architecture, as previously introduced.

The date of this extension at Víðivellir is not known. Guttormur, the younger boy in the photograph was born in 1878. Assuming that he is approximately five, it is likely that the photograph dates to around 1883. The accounts of the general store across the river from Víðivellir are preserved for the years 1882 and 1883, including Jón Guttormsson’s records of transactions. In November 1882, Jón purchased 428 feet of lumber for $8.56, which was likely the material used for the extension as discussed in the previous section (Icelandic Collection, Friðriksson and Jónasson store ledger).

Why did the family of four extend their house at this time? Apart from having two windows downstairs, there are no obvious signs of ‘improvement’ in the new house, which is built of the same materials and is the same design as the first. It did, however, create a much larger living space for the family – perhaps unnecessarily as there are no suggestions that the family was growing at this time. Thinking about assembling of the house in connection to the development of the community allows us to search for other explanations. Notably it highlights the nearly contemporaneous establishment of Friðjón Friðriksson and Sigtryggur Jónasson’s sawmill and store across the Icelandic River, which is likely to have increased the traffic that passed the farm.

In one of his published reminiscences, Guttormur recalls his parents running a guesthouse called the Stopping Place (Guttormsson, 2007). Recalling these early years at the farm Guttormur wrote:

There was steady traffic during the winter … mainly along the river by our home. Long rows of colourfully decorated dog teams could be seen carrying pelts down to Stone Fork … . In those years the Icelandic River was more travelled than Main Street in Winnipeg, and ferried aid, riches, and spiritual nourishment. (Guttormsson, 2007: 78–80)

If the extension provided the family with the extra space desired to run the guesthouse, it also conveniently facilitated the separation of living circumstances and a decrease in the activity on the farm. In 1904, Guttormur transported the earliest part of the house to Lake Manitoba where he set up home with his new wife Jensína Daníelsdóttir (Guttormssons’ Family Memoirs, n.d.). The house, built to be ready for his birth thus became his marital home on the shores of a different lake. The transport of the house reminds us about the qualities of log houses: they can be disassembled and re-assembled. It also reflects how this characteristic complimented the first decades of settlement more generally where the movement of people between homesteads and even settlement areas was common as migrants sought to forge stable roots in sometimes uncertain new homeland. The transport of log houses is not unknown within the Icelandic colony. Indeed, the Vigfússon’s house, now a part of the heritage village in Arborg, Manitoba, was similarly moved by its builders who labelled each log to ensure it could be correctly re-assembled.

The farm at Víðivellir, and the remaining part of the house, was meanwhile occupied by Snjólaug, who kept a few sheep and continued the family tradition of taking in lodgers (Guttormssons’ Family Memoirs, n.d.). We lose sight of the house at Lake Manitoba when Guttormur returned to Víðivellir in 1911 with Jensína and their two daughters Arnheiður and Pálína and moved in with Snjólaug. At this point, the later log house became the home for a family of five, the largest ever to live on the farm at Víðivellir, even though the house was just over half the size it was seven years previously. The house served the family for around four years until the devastating loss of the youngest daughter, Hulda, from pneumonia in 1914. The death, partly blamed on the dwelling’s lack of insulation, brought Guttormur to begin gathering materials once again ‘for a new home': logs from his land and plans from a Eaton’s catalogue.

The biography of house and inhabits were mutuality dependant. Birth, deaths, marriage and migration, combined with the material properties of the home were transformative; they shaped and played off one another. These were further connected to the development of the community, the establishment of businesses, the movement of traders and labourers along with the establishment of new social and economic hubs further afield.