uaarchives

My great-grandma has a few pictures like this of her and her brothers playing around in the snow when they were little. The sleds that they used back then, though, were way different. Although I am fine with the plastic sleds that we use today, I would love to try out one of these old wooden sleds one day. www.hawnice.com/snow

click this link is flickr 1890 in color adf.ly/XTCFW and skip adds in the way lol

Not that I want to tell you your business or anything but I wonder about the word "crude" here. That has a lot of negative baggage associated with it. Perhaps it does not give full weight to the appropriateness and indeed creativity of vernacular building forms. Further, as has been argued for other forms of pioneer technology, very rational decisions were made about how to employ various resources of labor, time, capital and materials to achieve some necessary immediate objectives. Plain, yes, unadorned, yes, but I'm not sure myself that I'd make so bold as to label it "crude".

Thank you for your thoughts, jamica1 -- you're right that some words have multiple connotations. While there are a few definitions of the word "crude" that could be viewed negatively, the definition intended here was simply "belonging to an early stage of technical development; characterized by simplicity and (often) crudeness."

Fair enough.

Was this John Brickell's cabin or only one like it?