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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)

CHAPTER FOUR

INTERIOR WALL FINISHES

In Louisbourg, owners chose to finish off interior walls with earth-based, mortar-based, or gypsum-based renderings, or with wood. Of the renderings a lime-based crépis or enduit of the same range of quality as for an exterior wall finish was the most popular choice (the smoothing enduit being about 2 1/2 times more expensive than the coarser crépis). Laths were optional. Despite the added cost, Benoist, the owner of a Block 2C piquet house, preferred an enduit inside and out. In contrast, the widow Rodrigue, who proposed to build a large rubblestone masonry residence in the same block, restricted her more expensive enduit-crépis combination finish to particular walls only; for the others, crepissage à pierre apparente was the finish, a technique which would have left the faces of the stones visible.

Clay-based and gypsum-based renderings, the choice of several military and civilian builders, were not popular finishes. At Port La Joie and elsewhere, laths, for clay-based renderings, were specified, while for a Block 5A residence its builder chose a clay finish with a lime-based rendering for the kitchen. Likewise, gypsum (plaster) found its way into some fireplaces, onto the masonry walls of the chapel of the King's Bastion barracks, and over the interior piquet partitions and window and door jambs of Levasseur's Block 23A masonry residence. Plaster, however, was not readily available, stockpiling was expensive, and wastage was high. Consequently Levasseur obtained his work only by incurring an added expense: his agreement to pay the contractor the same price for the lime-based enduits required elsewhere in the building as for the plaster.

A more popular interior finish was wood, by itself, or together with a nearby mortar rendering. Known as a lambris, it consisted of one pouce tongued and grooved boards (local or from Boston), planed on the visible side, and then nailed vertically with top and bottom moldings or tringles, perhaps only 1/2 pouce high. Tringles were in general use, but cornices and molded tringles en facon de corniche did get placed on occasion: in the Block 34C Vallée house (perhaps 4 pouces high), in the governor's pavilion (one pied high) and in the Block 13 hospital (above the doors). Cornices, an architectural detail, were expensive, time consuming to produce, and required skilled labour to develop the proper angles. Moreover, they used a considerable quantity of wood, whether they were made of oak (which was preferred) or pine or fir.

As with a rendering, lambris was placed anywhere it was thought necessary: walls, dormer and window embrasures, around stair wells, above doors, beneath windows, or on door casings - even once, in Block 23A, in order to hang a tapestry. There were, however, more elaborate finishes as well. Carpenters in a crown-owned building were to install panels above and below some doors and windows; while in a Block 23A room they were to place lambris with panels (wainscot) and cornices. In 1749, in the commissaire-odonnateur's residence, the apartment was remodeled with paneled lambris. Paneling, produced from dry, good quality boards of one pouce thickness, planed one side and assembled with tongues and grooves, and including the tringles and the nails, was an expensive proposition costing 27 livres the square toise (compared to 12 livres, and sometimes considerably less, for common lambris).

Aesthetic reasons perhaps lay behind much of the desire to whitewash or paint interior walls. Yet it was a practice with few followers. Those that did bear the cost, like the owners of private homes in Block 5A or 34C or like the military, were lime washing a mortar finish in every case (never a wooden wall). Even fewer chose to use paint: the only known examples being the Block 2 and 23 residence of two of the highest ranking officials in Louisbourg.

Importation tables, administrative expenditure accounts and estate inventories, particularly that of Charles Ives Duval, a joiner and carpenter, suggest that painters could choose to use either an oil or a water-based distemper paint, with a variety of pigments. Available mixing materials were water, linseed oil, nut oil, milk, glue, turpentine, lime, white lead, whiting, a variety of ochres, vermilion and other pigments. Required equipment included paint brushes and stone pestles for grinding the paint.