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Homes and Home Life

In 1843 Sally Randall saw for the first time the Nauvoo home her husband had prepared for her and the children: "He has a lot with a log cabin on it and it is paid for. The house is very small but I think we can get along with it for the present. He had a table and three chairs. We have no bedsteads yet, but shall have soon." This simple but eloquent statement could well have been spoken by hundreds of Nauvoo wives about their first homes in Illinois.

According to editor Thomas Gregg of Warsaw, Illinois, the Saints of Nauvoo built about "twelve hundred Hand-hewn log cabins, most of them white-washed inside, two to three hundred good substantial brick houses and three to five hundred frame houses." Whether Gregg's observation refers just to the city of Nauvoo or to the entire suburban area, when we consider the total population, there must have been, on average, between seven and ten persons per household. Some of the finer homes of course, could easily have accommodated such large families. The John D. Lee home was ninety feet long, two and one half stories high and contained twenty-two rooms. Built of brick and with a cellar, it was wood grained and finished from top to bottom. This house was an exception, though. More typical was the home that Ann Pitchforth described in a letter to her family in England: "We have a very small house with two rooms and a shed, no upstairs and the rent is 9 pounds and 10 shillings a year. By paying 20 pounds down, I can secure a house and one acre of land and leave the remainder to be paid by 10 pounds a year till paid off. Forty pounds will buy a house and lot and all in the city."

Such small houses for large families meant a lack of privacy as we think of it today. Most homes had no hallways; residents simply went through one room to get to another. These small, hard-to-heat homes also meant several family members sharing a bed, or at least the same bedroom. Such crowding had led to the development of the trundle bed, a bed that could be pushed back under a higher one during the daytime. Privacy was also hindered in these primitive homes by large cracks in the floors of the lofts, which permitted both sight and sound to pass. Locks on bedroom doors were practically unheard of. Even the wealthy did not have the concept of privacy that most Americans have today.

The lack of privacy, however, was not the only primitive aspect of homes in the 1840s. Most walls were unpapered or colorless, windows often went uncurtained, and beds were utilitarian and undecorated. The absence of improvements gave a bare, half-furnished appearance to most homes.

Home life underwent a great change during the 1840s. Fireplaces were bricked up, and cast iron stoves replaced them. With these convenient incinerators gone, there was more trash and refuse to be disposed of otherwise. Gone was the magnetism of the open fire, so kitchens, no longer all-purpose gathering rooms, shrank in size, and separate dining rooms and parlors were added.