Ashful
Minister of Fire
I should add, if you're looking at a pre-Portland masonry house in town, or built anywhere near a lime kiln, then it likely has lime-based mortars throughout. Lime-based mortars are not quite as durable as Portland, but they're infinitely better than mud-stacked walls.
It's not that the tech to build with better mortars didn't exist back then, it's that the transportation costs of lime where absolutely crippling high. Before railroads, if you were building a farm 30 miles from the closest city or lime kiln, all of the lime and other components not found on-site had to be hauled by ox cart over dirt horse trails, to be delivered to your building site. You're talking a multi-day journey with a crew and a team of ox, to deliver a relatively small amount of product per wagon load, compared to our modern "dump truck" way of thinking.
This is why you find many old PA farm houses built with just plain old mud as the bedding mortar, and sparingly using that expensive lime for just the stucco or pointing, as a weather seal. I imagine the same convention was followed throughout most of what was then the frontier.
It's not that the tech to build with better mortars didn't exist back then, it's that the transportation costs of lime where absolutely crippling high. Before railroads, if you were building a farm 30 miles from the closest city or lime kiln, all of the lime and other components not found on-site had to be hauled by ox cart over dirt horse trails, to be delivered to your building site. You're talking a multi-day journey with a crew and a team of ox, to deliver a relatively small amount of product per wagon load, compared to our modern "dump truck" way of thinking.
This is why you find many old PA farm houses built with just plain old mud as the bedding mortar, and sparingly using that expensive lime for just the stucco or pointing, as a weather seal. I imagine the same convention was followed throughout most of what was then the frontier.
