Good observation, Tim,
This harsh reality of life certainly must have played a major role in developments along the east coast.
Then add on top of that as settlement moved further west, Indian raids. Some of my own ancestors were involved in the so-called 'Hochstetler Massacre' when Indians raided an Amish settlement in the 1750s
Indiana (the land of the Indians) had a pretty violent early history, right up until the time of the Civil War. Where I live, there was once something like 14 Indian villages within a few miles that were burned to the ground by the army (actually the Indian trouble here was a part of the war of 1812)
Like you can find remnants of the early settlements around you, we can still find remnants of the Indian cabins (oddly enough, built by the US government for them) in fields around us.
Your story reminded my of my travels in the Jura mountains in the northwest of the Canton of Bern. There, on top of the mountains, I could see many ruins of Mennonite and Amish farms that had been abandoned centuries earlier. There were stone foundations, old dry stone walls marking the old boundaries, and wild apple trees that had sprung up from the orchards kept by the Mennonites (In the Jura, Amish and Mennonites were known for their fruit and their good wine). These were all abandoned over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries when the people were given the opportunity to come to America. This was meaningful to me, because some of those ruins were the ruins of the places my own ancestors lived.
In Indiana, settlement was very -rugged- People had to do a lot of work to make a home. Forests needed to be cleared, swamps drained, and then houses and barns built.
Like you said, the crude nature of the timber they would use was necessary. They didn't have the time to make them nice, and it wasn't necessary. Thankfully for them, someone had devised a layout method that worked perfectly in this situation.
Also they didn't have tools. A Swiss carpenters shop might have had over 100 different planes for various tasks, a dozen or so axes, and a collection of chisels, augers, and other tools. Having been in an old carpenters shop, the sheer number of tools is astounding. But on the frontier, you just didn't have this. A guy might show up with 2 axes, a hammer, and a chisel, and that's it.
