Three “Sustainable” Homes
The earliest family home I know about still exists. Built out of cob in the sixteenth century on a plateau with a great view of the English Channel between a hilltop 200’ above it on the east, a river valley 100’ below it on the west, and a sheer chalk cliff over the English Channel to the south in an area known as Salcombe Regis, Devon, England. Cob was made by mixing fibrous material such as straw or dung with clay or sand, local soil, and water, heavily compressed and mixed often by using cattle to tread over it until it was the right consistency to spread over a well-drained stone foundation to a depth of about 12”-18”, as wide as it was deep. Once that layer was fully dry, a new layer would go on top of it until the walls were finished. After the outside walls were finished, the cob was covered with a lime wash or lime plaster and wide eaves of thatched roofing with thatched “eyebrows” over the upper windows. Huge roughhewn timbers often stretched over the first floor and supported the second. It offered great thermal mass and reasonable insulation but required regular maintenance to keep the cob from getting wet.
William Clapp’s Combe Wood, named after the nearby forest, served as little more than a pleasant memory for most of his children who emigrated to New England around 1630, but stayed in the family until it and several other Salcombe Regis copyholds passed by marriage in 1770 from yeoman’s daughter Sarah Clapp to her husband John Kestell, an army surgeon, who held the manor in Ottery St. Mary. They made Ottery St. Mary their permanent home. However, Combe Wood had been nothing more than a rental property owned by the Clapps for many years before then. It survives today as a great getaway, once home for the British rock group the Kinks, and owned by a wealthy Yorkshire family when I visited in 1995. Whoever takes it on must maintain the thatched roof and other characteristics as a national heritage site.
My ancestor George Christopher Clapp was three when his Father died in Easthampton, Massachusetts. He was taught a trade, married and then followed most of his elder brothers to the Midwest shortly after his eldest child was born in 1847. He chose Minnesota, settling in a beautiful area brimming with tensions because of lands taken recently from the Sioux. Worrying about his family, he used Irish masons to build a thick-walled (14”) limestone house, a plentiful commodity at nearby Kasota, Minnesota quarries.
The one-room first floor included a large hearth stone and fireplace as well as a stairway to living quarters on the second floor. Both the entryway and the stairway had massive doors that locked as, while it was unforgivable to deny entry for shelter to any person in the winter, he could lock the stairway door to provide added safety for his family. War defined his MN existence, first as a corporal during the Sioux uprising, second as a officer leading an African American heavy artillery unit in the Union Army, and finally as a dedicated member of the Grand Army of the Republic. As before, the house offered great thermal mass, but was in dire need of more insulation. My grandfather talked about frost on the inside walls in the winter.
The real builder and farmer was my great grandfather Harrie Winter Clapp who doubled the size of the house with identical limestone blocks and marble corners including a large porch and a kitchen with a Franklin stove on the first floor changing the original entry way into a kitchen entrance. The new second floor annex above the kitchen utilized the original stairway to get upstairs and a passage to the additional space through the second-floor wall. He also oversaw construction of the Kasota Presbyterian Church, which gave my other great grandfather a new home and led to an eventual double marriage of Harrie’s daughter Ella to George Peake and my grandfather to the minister’s youngest daughter, both young couples moving to AL a few years later. Harrie was a very hardworking farmer, but finally ended up selling the isolated farmhouse and building his last house in Kasota out of concrete blocks. The old farmhouse enjoyed a short adventurous life as a speakeasy, before being refitted with insulation and a new interior by a plumber and his family. He told me that, when he entered the house, the lower level was full of whiskey bottles and the stairway door with bullet holes.
Success in this age lies in finding the sweet spot of sustainability, safety, peace, and good health in a thoroughly industrialized and competitive world. 200 years ago, we did not have the ability to destroy ourselves but now we do. The average middle-class inhabitant of a first world nation may live better than the wealthiest individual in 1824 but the wealthiest person in our time is just as vulnerable as the poorest third world child to some modern threats. Success for me looks like cooperating for the common good in a planned sustainable community where everyone has the same objective. We will not be safer than anyone else but will have a better and healthier time by not being part of the problem.
In building our new home in Rachel Carson Ecovillage, the most valuable purchase by far is the community and commons. The design for cohousing consciously limits the size of the community to 60-100 people, a sweet spot for a cohesive team approach to anything worthwhile. Our community has achieved an extraordinary collaborative design for housing in a fantastic setting despite many challenges that would have derailed any individual talented enough to work alone and most other groups. Like our PHIUS-certified passive homes, our multi-generation ecovillage is built to last, as is the ecosystem and any community garden we share.
-David Clapp, Founding member and future resident of RCE, August 31, 2024