Native American home exterior with couple at Taholah — 1/27/1942 — #19107_1
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Photograph Copyright Anderson & Middleton Company
United States — Washington (State) — Taholah
Quinault Tribal Council
Thanks to Terri Middleton, who located information in the original Jones Photo Co. studio registers stating this to be the Bertrand home, Taholah. The interior of the house is seen in image number 19108_1.
Thanks to Sam Talley, who adds: "An interesting thing in this photo is the hand split cedar shake siding and roof of the house. People with homes far from any town would split their own siding whether it was boards or shakes.Shake splitters would locate prime old cedar windfalls (blown down for many years) and cut them into blocks 27 inches long. They would use a froe and mallet to split the individual shakes instead of taking the bolts or blocks to a mill where shakes were cut into boards with a bandsaw. The roof shakes are called hand-split tapers because they taper naturally from 1/2 inch down. In 1970 there were very few of the shake splitters left. Good cedar needed for hand splitting was hard to find. I located an old hermit who lived in a little 8-foot trailer in the Quinault woods and hired him to split shakes for my new home's roof. He located an old cedar log out in a swamp and used a cedar plank walkway and old wheelbarrow to get the split and banded shakes out across the swamp to the road and my pickup truck. He charged me $15 per square. The shakes have been on my roof for about 40 years and still look like new. That kind of pime cedar has almost totally disappeared nowadays." [2009]
