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Researching the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site of Canada
  Recherche sur la Forteresse-de-Louisbourg Lieu historique national du Canada

DOMESTIC BUILDING CONSTRUCTION 
AT THE FORTRESS OF LOUISBOURG, 1713 - 1758

By

Eric Krause

1996 Draft Report

(Fortress of Louisbourg
Report Number H G 10)

Copyright © Parks Canada/Parcs Canada

CHAPTER ONE

EXTERIOR WALLS

There were three major building techniques at Louisbourg: piquet, charpente and rubblestone masonry; and one minor technique, piece-sur-piece, popular in Quebec but chosen infrequently on Isle Royale. Several other unnamed approaches, used in isolated cases, but not enough to be considered important types, were tried too.

Piquet, brought to Isle Royale from Newfoundland in 1713 by the original colonists, was a wooden wall construction technique. Not the dominant type after 1721, as in the first eight years, it remained popular until the final siege of 1758. Such buildings were both quick to erect and usually inexpensive.

Piquet walls required logs 9-10 pieds long, round or squared-off. Builders stood them vertically, close together and without a foundation, instead staking the logs directly in the ground. These walls were then stiffened, in one or two places: across the wall, near the tops of the piquets, with a length of wooden rail or ribbon nailed to the wall; or on top of the wall with a length of mortised wall plate fitted over tenons on the ends of the piquets.

Builders, wishing even more rigid walls, as at Port La Joye on Isle Saint-Jean, added arch boutants, accords or contrebouts, wooden struts that they jammed up against an exterior plate, which, in turn, were attached to the wall plate. Such a procedure was less possible in the town of Louisbourg itself, however, because of a building regulation that forbade similar like projections, struts for fences, from advancing too far into a street. As an option were interior corner bracings, diagonal wind braces in the walls or even a dependence upon floor and ceiling joists to keep walls rigid.

Piquet structures, their walls solid, without famed openings and rarely built with a wooden solle or sill (buried in the ground) - even those with wall plates - were not framed constructions in the traditional sense. Moreover, they appeared not to have distinct corner posts, discernible in function from the other piquets, suggesting that builders probably raised such walls a single piquet, a larger section or entire wall at a time.

Walls during initial construction consequently much resembled piquet or palisade fences in type of wood chosen and in the techniques employed. Fence specifications, recognizing a supply problem, had quickly substituted fir, spruce and pine in place of oak. Piquets for posts were to be straight, 9 pieds long, 6 pouces in diameter, with a ribbon 4 pouces wide, 2 pouces thick, embedded one pouce deep into the piquets, near the top. A single 6 pouce spike, driven through the ribbon at each post - alternatively, one spike at the top of the ribbon, the next at the bottom - made the fence rigid.

The second major building type, charpente, or half-timber, its frame a network of connected horizontal and vertical members, was superior to the piquet system in structural design. Half-timbering, which allowed craftsmen working with joinery, often mortises and tenons, rather than nails, to use wood to its greatest advantage, was a system that balanced or counterpoised competing forces in a tied frame that absorbed and transferred weight and stress. Pegs for the joinery, more an afterthought than a structural necessity, nevertheless helped the frame cope with unexpected strains that sometimes developed.

The hand-hewn, squared-off members, used in charpente constructions, were thick, often more than a foot, and were large even to piquet's standards. Assembling such timbers called for practiced workmanship, to ensure that the parts of the frame - the horizontal wall plates and ground sills, the widely spaced corner and intermediate posts, and the diagonal posts - fitted together as planned.

Illustrations of the 1730's, of Port La Joie and Louisbourg buildings, clearly depict some of the techniques: intermediate posts tenoned into the plates and sills, ground sills and wall plates into the corner posts, intermediate posts (excepting the diagonal ones) severing ground sills, even the omission of ground sills beneath some windows. Procedures for the same technique, a ground sill tenoned into a corner post for example, varied too: one builder might sink the corner post into the foundation while another might place it directly on top of the foundation.

Finally, in charpente construction, there were the other members that stiffened the frame: headers, sills, joists, the occasional framing members high in a gabled end, and the diagonal wind braces that tied the plate to the corner post.

The third major building type in Louisbourg, rubblestone masonry with its expensive and labour intensive load-bearing stone walls, was also the least common type. The royal authorities built some: in Blocks 1, 13 and 23, at various batteries for barracks, and at Port Toulouse, but few private individuals, wishing to enjoy the inherent qualities of strength and beauty which stone buildings appeared to exude, could afford the high initial construction costs.

Local government propaganda, particularly after the fire of 1737, nevertheless openly encouraged private masonry construction. Unfortunately, such moral encouragement for a man like François Vallée, a social climber with limited resources, spelled ruin. Having built an impressive mansard roofed masonry home in Block 34, he was forced into bankruptcy, the loss of his home and into a charge upon the state; a situation from which he and his family were never to recover.

Other private builders took a more cautious approach, noting the slippage and warpage in the fortified works, the nature of local rubblestone generally too round or too small, and the required level of workmanship necessary for a building strong, plumb, level and on a firm base. Lime mortar needed to be well mixed and sieved, one-third lime and two-thirds granulated sand; the sand, being sea sand, needed be exposed to a rain/snow cycle to leach out the harmful salts; the stones, being quite irregular at Louisbourg, needed be first shaped with sledge hammers; and the raising of walls needed be a course at a time, allowing the mortar of one course to dry before raising the course above.

A completed wall, some perhaps strengthened with iron reinforcing rods as planned for the King's Bastion Barracks, was as thin as one pied, and as thick as 3 pieds. Quite common though was the 2 pied thick building wall, its largest stones at the bottom, rising up with many long headers, to a summit whose dimensions might be less than below. This reduction might have been achieved in Louisbourg in several ways: by setting back the wall at each floor level, as in the Royal Battery barracks; or, as proposed for the King's Bastion barracks, by a natural inward slope: 2 pieds thick at the bottom but only one pied 8 pouces at the top.

Alternating stretches and headers, of brick or cut stone for example, strengthened the corners of masonry buildings, added to the cost, sometimes substantially, of a building when of a material different than the main walls, and were a fashionable aesthetic touch for an owner wishing to impress a neighbour or an entire town. The cut stone quoin, particularly when used with cramps, as outlined in a Block 3 church proposal, to counter frost heave, was the superior quoin. In contrast, local brick quoins were the object of much derision, those at the King's Bastion having quickly deteriorated. Cut stone was suggested as a replacement, even though good quality imported bricks were by then available.

This foreign brick from New England, which measured only 7 pouces long by 3 pouces 6 lignes wide, by one pouce 8 lignes thick, was smaller than that of Isle Royale: 8 pouces 3 lignes by 4 pouces 2 lignes by 2 pouces 1/2 ligne. In construction, for chimneys and ovens for example, its mortar recipe was the same fine mortar as required for rubblestone constructions.

This problem with local bricks likely accounts for the lack of all-brick structures on Isle Royale. The only known example, built circa 1745, a private Block 2 residence Batie en Briques, haut et Bas, had a small basement and three habitable stories. It is also possible that it was erected by the English during the 1745-48 period, there being no French building contract to prove otherwise, and the curious fact that its French owner chose to remain during the English occupation and not sail back to France with the rest of the town's inhabitants.

The few Isle Royale builders who chose the pièce-sur-pièce building type have left a poor record. There was, however, the Mira owner who constructed une maison de charpente piece sur piece, and une grange de piquets piece sur piece. Further away, at Port Dauphin, there was a military building with vertical corner and intermediate posts, grooved top to bottom, placed 10 pieds apart, between which would be dropped the horizontal posts that built up the walls.

There were possibly many other pièce-sur-pièce techniques, but only one detailed proposal has survived. This was a pièce-sur pièce à machicoulis tower to be constructed of one pied square horizontal members, with dovetail joints at each of the corners and mortises and tenons at each of the large or intermediate posts. The finish of the horizontal charpente members in the upper storey of this charpente tower was to have been on all four sides - but of all other members, on three sides only.

Piquet, charpente, masonry and pièce-sur-pièce were not the island's only construction types and builders chose from at least three other techniques to meet individual requirements. Migrant and less well-to-do fishermen who required a building erected on a jetty or fish stage jutting into a harbour often put up simple sheds, with light roofs and walls of conifer branches, set on equally flimsy stages. Other more sedentary fishermen may have built more substantial structures, perhaps like those depicted in several Louisbourg harbour views, apparently with sod roofs and walls.

Another type of light construction were the board buildings raised as temporary shelters for construction workers. Easy to erect and remove upon completion of a project, they were relatively inexpensive in materials and labour. For example, having decided in 1754 to lower a height of land at Black Rock, Louisbourg, the military paid a master carpenter and several assistants only 108 livres for shelters, which, including labour, defrayed the cost of 907 pieds of one pouce boards, 500 nails and one door locking device.

Yet another minor construction type were open air shelters. One, in the yard of the Louisbourg hospital, covering an oven, was probably a charpente structure, a shingled-roofed shed-like building, with open walls of framed posts and cross-pieces. A second, envisioned for a proposed (1724) market place in Louisbourg, was to consist, apparently, of spaced vertical poles set checkerboard fashion.

These latter construction types undoubtedly served the practical, commonplace needs of their builders, but several others were simply unique to Louisbourg. For 12 years the town's first engineers lived in such a structure in Block One, a building whose exterior walls consisted of eight 2 x 3 pieds thick spaced masonry pillars, each perhaps 7 pieds high. Across their tops stretched a wooden wall plate and in between the pillars, framed and open partitions serving as a partial infill. Beneath the floors, its sleepers rested on a 3 1/2 pieds thick layer of back fill secured from the initial surface excavation for the building.

A second curious building type arose from an abortive proposal to house some winter workers in Block 1. These two structures were to have small 2 pieds high foundation walls supporting 8 pieds high wooden posts. Between each post and the foundation was to be a small square of masonry; the roof was to be shingled.

There were other building types too, no doubt, and a few builders would vary a common one, like a charpente for an open air shelter for example. Another builder, Joseph Brisson, who acquired the large masonry Block 34C residence of François Vallée, decided to renovate an entire gabled end wall in charpente with a masonry infill. He gave no reason for the drastic action that he was to take in 1752.

Later, in 1755, Joseph Lartigue rented a Rue d'Orléans house to Claude Caresmintrand, a master joiner, with an understanding to convert this building, apparently of piquet, into one of charpente. According to the rental agreement, if, in two or three years, Lartigue wished to exercise his option and replace the piquets that held the traverses of the house with pine posts, Caresmintrand would be obliged to furnish seven posts and his labour. As well, he was to place the pine weather boarding that Lartigue was to provide along with the necessary nails.

Another unusual project was initiated in 174l by André Villefayaul who had sold a section of his Louisbourg property to a soldier and carpenter named Pascal. The buyer agreed not only to string a palisade fence at his own cost between the two properties, but also to allow the vendor to pose the traverses, presumably joists, of any future buildings on this fence. Since Pascal too wished the fence for planned buildings, the two neighbours also agreed to share the cost and use of a single chimney stack for a set of back-to-back fireplaces.

Shared constructions along property lines for party walls and fireplaces were common in Louisbourg and France, though the Villefayaul/Pascal approach was perhaps novel. The Custom of Paris, a written common law, was the controlling regulatory reference for all exigencies, including the sharing of initial construction costs, future repairs and alterations. Neighbours, however, could mutually choose to ignore the Custom and agree to alternate approaches, both verbally and in writing, but at their peril if by word alone. Therefore, common walls might produce attractive savings, but they could also result in expensive legal entanglements for those not properly versed in the law. The Custom, whose principles were both basic and few, was itself not complicated, but in complex constructions, builder, neighbour or new owner might not always agree in their interpretations of the law. Indeed, in France, a large body of jurisprudence grew up around the Custom for guidance.

A revealing agreement concerning a shared common wall was reached in the 1730s between Mezy, the commissaire-ordonnateur (financial administrator for Isle Royale), and the widow Rodrigue, who owned a strip of land that stood between her Block 2 charpente house and his masonry residence. The widow sold Mezy the strip so that he could enlarge his building in a westerly direction towards her home. On the new property line between them he was to construct at his own cost a masonry wall that they would hold in common and which was to replace her eastern wooden wall. A passageway through the commissaire's addition was to provide the widow with free access to her yard from the street in front. Mezy agreed to pay for any accidental damage to the widow's floors, joists and roof, and also consented to raising her chimney stacks above the new walls and placing toothing stones in the new common wall.

In a 1750 hospital proposal, similar toothing stones were embedded in the middle and at the ends of the wall. Such stones would have allowed the widow to join up exterior and partition walls should she ever desire to demolish her home and rebuild in masonry. Ironically, a fire soon after the agreement consumed her home and two others, and though she drew up plans for a masonry structure, Mezy blocked that move, and initiated expropriation procedures that his successor, François Bigot completed in 174l.