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The Hutmacher trip which was on October 17th-19th, involved three students from our class (hist 431) and thirteen students from Professor Isern's History 103 class and of course Dr. Isern and his wife. When we arrived at the scene (which was quite a ways out into the country side) there were also a fair amount of volunteers and individuals with Preservation North Dakota. The objective of this journey was to build a new section of roof that I estimate to have been twenty five feet long or so and also to build up one section of wall about a foot. It was truly amazing how much work it was, just to do this amount of building. The roof requires rafters, which are logs, then a layer of brush woven together, followed by a thick layer of flax stray, and then three seperate thick layers of clay mixtures. Most of my job entailed mixing up the various clay mixes, both by hand and with a mortar mixer. There were quite a few of us mixing clay with our hands in wheelbarrows for the first roof layer. There was certainly a great deal of mixing and shoveling going on.
The most amazing part of this trip was to see how these people lived and how much work they went through in order to build and maintain their house. They even hauled water by the bucket a distance of probably a 1/4 mile. I imagine that they were in extremely good shape and probably had a close family. The funny thing about this house, which was built in 1928, is that it was really not very far from town (which is no longer in existence) which had lumber for sale. In other words, the option to build the house out of wood did exist. However, the Hutmacher's were more accustomed to working with clay and rock and evidently were somewhat tight with the money.
One of the daughters/children who lived in the house came and spoke to us on Sunday before we left, I believe her name was Eleanor, but I could be mistaken. Anyhow she told us that they would have to repair the walls and roof on an almost yearly basis. Also she explained that the house was really warm in the winter and cool in the summer. They even had electricity installed after a while and incorporated a television into the house. The inside of the house had wallpaper right over the clay, which was kind of neat.
I must say that this trip was very unique and I'm quite certain that I will never forget it. Dr. Isern even bought the group Rocky Mountain Oysters for an appetizer at the Buckskin Bar and Grill. I never thought that I would try them, but I did try one and it actually wasn't to bad, kind of troubling thinking about it though.