Friday, December 19, 2008

Sharing the Rock House Experience

This blog is an attempt to start a conversation about restoring, maintaining, and living in old pioneer rock houses. It comes from a little town in Northern Utah that has about two dozen pioneer rock houses that were built between 1875 and 1900. There are old rock houses elsewhere in Utah and the West and would like to include all pioneer rock-house dwellers in this forum.

To get things rolling on the forum, I'll include some pictures of my rock and log cabin in a separate post that I'll call Our Rock Houses. If you want me to add yours to that posting, email me some pictures and some information about it.

Here is a picture of a falling down rock house down the road from me. Someone told me it had a fire. But the rock is still standing!


Local history says that there are so many rock houses in this little Utah town (pop. 700) because one of the early settlers built a house out of wood, which burned down just after it was finished. He decided to try again, but used rock the second time around. I guess it caught on. They imported the rock from a quarry just west of here. I think the rock came from a place called Rigby's Ranch.

For starters, here are some ideas about topics for this forum:

- Our rock houses
- Restoring a rock house on a budget
- Materials and tools for tuck pointing rock houses
- Making a rock house livable
- How to heat a rock house
- Pros and cons of different types of stoves
- Modern roofs and rock houses
- Restoring a rock house on a budget
- Stories about pioneers building houses
- The 3 Little Pigs revisited ... How Solid is a Rock House?
- How to research a house's history
- You name it, and I'll start a thread for it

Let me know what you think. To join the conversation, use the Comment feature. But there may be some crazies out there. So you might want to withhold your full name, address, and phone number from public view. If you want to add information regularly, contact me via email, and we'll see if we can add you to the list of people who can post to this blog. If you want to include information about your house on a one-time basis, send it to me and I'll post it.

Keep on rockin'!