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Chapter 6. Building the Ranch House (Lake House), 1854
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Chapter 6 Building the Ranch House (Lake House), Hawkins presented an impressive piece of news to the North Carolina family on January , . To his mother-in-law he wrote: “I am very busy sawing out lumber for her [Ariella’s] Lake Auston House. She is going to put up a large and splendid building and I hope after it is finished to have you to live with us. I think we will make a pretty place of it.” By March , , J.B. reported to Major Archibald Alston that the framing of the house was up. We will complete the frame of my Lake House this week. It is three stories high with nine rooms and cross passages and galleries all around with a large closet to every room and every room has a fire place. It will be a star house when completed. The sawmill makes lumber very fast. We are up to our shoulders in work with our different works to keep them all going as they ought to go. Ariella’s diplomatic husband refers to the house as his wife’s when he writes to her mother, but when he writes Major Arch, it becomes “my Lake House.” J. B. Hawkins selected the location for the house and to a large extent oversaw the construction himself. He had the help of a master carpenter and the skilled craftsmen among the plantation’s slave workforce . He supervised sawing the lumber cut from trees on his own Caney bottom land. The flooring wood in the house was ash. Some of the larger structural supporting timbers still had evidence of the bark. Even today, the marks of an adze are evident on some heavier beams, and nails in use had square heads. The house was certainly made from a detailed plan, but who drew the plan is still a mystery, although there are grounds for speculation. 50 plantation beginnings Possibly the design came from some printed, ready-made plan that skilled carpenters carried with them as part of the tools of their trade. At the time J. B. Hawkins had such a skilled carpenter working for him at Caney. Two years before the start of the Lake House, he wrote from Caney on January , , that he had a ship’s carpenter making a “vessel” for him (probably the schooner grounded in the storm of , as described later in this chapter). J.B. also told Major Arch that he was having a “lot of fun” in a “pretty skiff” that the ship’s carpenter had made for him. At the time of this letter, he was using the skiff to hunt ducks up and down Caney Creek and said they were having them every day for dinner. We do know from other house building in the county that ship’s carpenters were employed in home construction. It was usual for plantations to have resident carpenters, blacksmiths, and brick masons. According to the census of , James B. Hawkins had a carpenter named Nicholas Barr working for him at Caney. Barr was born in France, but he was probably doing routine carpentry on the plantation and was not the special “ship’s carpenter” J.B. mentioned—that carpenter’s work was a piece of news. Nicholas Barr, then, was probably not responsible for the Ranch House, although he may well have worked on it. The Matagorda County census of lists several carpenters but only two ship’s carpenters. One was John Williams, born in Denmark and listed as a man of fifty in ; he would have been forty-four at the time the Ranch House was started. The other was Conrad Franz, who was twenty-nine years old at the time of the Census. Details of the construction of the Hawkins Ranch House suggest that a ship’s carpenter could have been instrumental in its design. The third story is held together in a “jib” construction, based on nautical construction methods including the creation of what is called a “pony wall,” allowing openings through it. Evidence of this construction method is that the floors of the dormer windows are placed about two feet higher than the floors of the dormered bedrooms themselves. Why the house was built at all and why it was located in the middle of the prairie at the head of Lake Austin are questions never fully explained. Certainly J. B. Hawkins had an interest in creating an icon of his own success and in providing his wife and children...