Howdy,

Colonial Era. 1720's. No engineers, self described architects, or general contractors. Just Master Builders. Woolley and Tomlinson were there names (house-carpenters!)

40' x 40' rooms

Spanning 40' with a floor system is kinda tricky. 40' timbers might be hard to find and if you did, serious deflection anyhow. So they came up with putting queen post arrangements in the partition walls above the hand-in-hand (or grillage). Does this seem ingenous? Anybody know where they could have found precedence for this? Any other thoughts on hand-in-hand framing.

These are kinda of cool to examine.




Credit where it is due. Peterson, Charles E. and Nelson, Lee H.
Building Early America