Serendipity, thy name is clay.
It just so happens that our recent daub damage has coincided with a local excavator’s discovery of clay.
Mike Mulligan hello?
Jim Halunen Brush Cutting and Mowing and Cheney Trucking and Materials have been digging a septic pit in the White Horse Beach area of Plymouth, about 10 miles south of Plimoth’s original settlement. To find the right ”percolation rate” they’ve had to dig deep on this particular lot. Several feet down, they came upon a nice deposit of clay. We gratefully received a delivery of several yards of this material yesterday:
Gumby Origin Story.
What’s the big dilly you ask?
Well, we love Gumby and Pokey as much as the next guy, but we’re not going to daub our walls with em. For one thing, they’re not found locally.
And their vivid colors might betray their other-worldly origins.
For more than a decade, we’ve been mixing mortar from clay which came from the bottom of Boston Harbor during The Big Dig. It’s called Boston Blue clay, and it’s a medium shade of gray in color, with a slight tinge of blue in places. The mortar made out of this clay seasons to a light gray color. Because the clay is very pure and “plastic”, it needs a fair amount of earth and binder in the mix to be useful as a mortar for our walls and chimneys. Unlike the vivid green and orange of Gumby and Pokey, the overall effect in our houses’ interior is a light gray color. Call it, Pilgrim Humours, if you’re looking for the correct shade at the paint store.
The White Horse Beach clay is much browner in hue, almost ruddy in places, with some flecks of gray.
It's so exfoliating!
It’s also more local and perhaps closer to what might have been used in pilgrim walls as a mortar. The primary sources speak of digging clay out of the side of Town Brook which we think is closer in appearance to the brown and ruddy color than the Boston Blue variety. We also have some anecdotal evidence of deposits of brown-colored clay in earthen basements of houses in downtown Plymouth today.
The overall appearance of the interior of our houses will subtly change over time, as we work more of the new clay into our walls and chimneys. We’ll also need to adapt our mortar recipes to this clay, which feels more silty and “crumbly” than the more dense Boston Harbor clay. We may need more binders like dung and straw, and less earth in the mix.
"Trodding Mortar" anagrams: Grand Dirt Motor and Daring Do Mr Trot!
Come the summer, we’ll be all feet on deck daubing The Francis Cooke House. We’ll use mostly mortar which has been reclaimed from the former house’s walls, but we’ll also be mixing in some of the new clay. It’s an opportunity to experiment with different varieties of clay mortar in the same house. If you’re local, come on in the mortar’s fine!
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Co-worker Eva Lipton remains in our hearts and thoughts and prayers as we approach Thanksgiving. Team Eva has set up a wonderful series of events and support pages for Eva and her family on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Team-EVA/223963567711425?fref=ts
Tags: 17th century house, daub, English carpentry, mortar, pilgrim house, Plimoth Plantation, The Francis Cooke House
“more binders like dung and straw”
That is not something I want to think about wading through barefoot! Good luck with that!
Cheers,
Derek
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, Derek–but it’s really not as bad as it sounds. Especially as the dung (from ruminants) is most often seasoned before it’s put in the mix! And it really does add to the mortar’s strength.
Good Day Folks,
How soon was it before milk products made it to New England? I know casein is a dubbing additive. Do you ever make lime additives and was it used?
Regards,
Jay
Hey Jay,
We’ve used shell lime in years past, but we have no definitive record of any lime being used in Plimoth prior to 1627. Exterior clapboards really alter the need for slaked lime whitewash to strengthen a wall’s mortar. Things change with brick chimneys and foundations later on, but in the early going, we speculate it’s wattle and daub or bust!
Hi Rick
The clay is the binder. The earth you mix it with is the filler and they work together to hold in place because the clay will shrink and fall away from the wall without the filler.
Just about all the clay in New England is a red, or iron bearing earthenware clay. It turns red when fired. When clay, or earth, is wet for a period of time, a certain bacteria eats the oxygen and changes the clay color in its raw state to a non red, often blue or gray color.
Enjoy your blog. Keep up the good work.
Ron
I was hoping you’d weigh in Ron! Thanks for the info. It makes a lot of sense to think of the clay itself as the binder, rather than the sand or loam. But what about the straw and etc threaded through the mix–would you consider that part of the binder as well?
Have you thrown local clay into pottery? What is your opinion of it?
See you next week. I’ll make the coffee–
Can’t you get clay from the old brickyards in Middleboro anymore?
Rick! It’s been years since we bought clay from Bridgewater. Was there a pit in Middleboro too? I didn’t know. When Michael scored us the Big Dig clay, it set us up for years and the cost was minimal. It’s really going to be interesting to see how this Manomet clay compares.
No, the straw ties the materials together but it’s the clay that keeps it all stuck together. It would help as an insulator.
I had some local clay years ago but it would not hold a form. Save a few pounds for me and I’ll try it.
Ron
Gosh, looks like my back yard! Two questions come to mind 1) how thick does this stuff end up when you plaster a wall , and 2) is this what you use to make ovens with ? I don’t have a good picture in my mind of how you will fill in the timber frame.
John
Hey John-
We usually daub the mortar out flush with the studs in the wall. That makes it about 3-4 inches thick. On an exterior wall, we’ll wattle up the panel with small, green saplings before the daub. There are a variety of ways to wattle; we’ll post about that process as we get closer to that part of building. Mortar is pushed in from the inside because of the clapboards nailed to the outside. In an interior wall, we’ll sometimes split out lathe (often from failed clapboards) and weave it in place before daubing. Mortar is worked in from both sides of the open wall.
The chimney and hearth walls are thicker. We don’t want any hollows in the area around the fire, so we’ll daub extra thick there. We also build up a fireback–sometimes called a reredose–with large rocks around the back of the hearth, and daub any remaining cracks very thickly.
The house mortar-mix is a little different from the oven mix we’ve used. We tend to use less vegetative material like straw. The “crouching beaver” ovens we exhibit have a bit of a murky provenance, and we’re moving toward replacing at least some of them with clome (or cloam) ovens which are more plausible for our site. (I’ve promised to blog about our clome ovens and new bake house for some time! We hope to have the whole works operational sometime in 2013 and Riven Word will document that).
I miss puddling clay. We used the Boston blue
back in 2011 when we built the wood fired kiln, also lovingly
known as Rosemary.
It was fun using the Big Dig clay for some experimental pieces
during those test firings.
I’ll be curious to hear how this local clay works for pottery
making.
I’ve seen Jim Halunen operate heavy machinery, he has done
several projects where I live… I’m sure he could pick up a single
pebble with his back hoe when he really wants!!
Have fun with all that clay, Jenny DeFreitas
Hi Jenny,
There’ll be plenty of clay to puddle come the summer. I think you should come out so as not to lose your puddling edge! How did the Big Dig clay work for pottery? We’ll get the inside story from Ron when he works the Manomet variety.
We really are grateful to Jim H. and Cheney Trucking for the clay.
So the pieces that come from that wood fired kiln are known as Rosemary’s Babies?
Hey, Rick. Great news! Brewster needs a good chinking.
We should have had the clay delivered right to the cross streets Ray!
Thanks Rick. It seems to me the walls I saw at Jamestown were thicker than what you are doing and didn’t square with the pictures of the construction you are showing. Sure wish I had a better memory and had taken more pictures. Would have liked to have seen Wolstenholm town too.
Can I get a guest-daub? Cheaper than a pedicure!
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