Hillbilly style barns and shotgun houses were fairly modern, anbd replaced log cabins. And thank God I only saw them out the truck windows when my Daddy drove over into Cedar County.
Here is a modern shotgun style house barn made by the Amish for $10,000 and delivered on a truck to your farm.
That one has modern ribbed metal siding.
Now, imagine that siding was tar paper with boards. The roof is galvanized steel with boards (later rubber tires were added).
To make one there had to be a sawmill and a railroad within wagon distance.
It’s the same as Tudor style only across the ocean.
There were native oak two by fours (true measure) for studs and then on the outside store bought tar roofing paper secured by horizontal two by fours, and then inside there might be newspapers for insulator then paperboard walls with smaller trim piece or maybe even two by fours to secure the paperboard and it all braced the structure.
When Daddy took me to such places, I knew that if I didn’t come back home, my mother would surely kill him, another old Scottish tradition carried far over the ocean. Serious.
There are Scots, then Scots Irish. We were Scottish Ozark Americans.
Our mothers looked like movie stars, theirs waddled around swatting and yelling at all their children.
Our fathers kept packs of foxhounds, theirs kept coon dogs.
The Scots Irish would offer Daddy whiskey or beer and sometimes even me, and that’s why Mama made it clear, that I’d come back to her in as good a shape as she’d sent me.
On St Patrick’s Day our mothers would check our clothes to make sure we wore no green.
Because they didn’t want us to marry those Scotch Irish girls that expected a shotgun house and barn.
The fair Scottish lassie, the pretty Geraldines, she demanded a modern house. Serious.
If I make it to heaven, the first thing I’ll do is ask Mama if I can ride to Cain Hill with Daddy, to buy fence posts and wire at the sawmill.
Sing one, Tom T Hall
