Many years ago, I recall reading a newspaper article about the last smokehouse in Arlington County being razed for the property to be developed into a housing complex. Such was the pace of urban sprawl in the Washington suburbs.
Traveling across the Northern Neck, I have seen the passage of other smokehouses, indicating that our iconic rural institution is passing into history.
The smokehouse was “invented” in the days before electricity as a means of preserving meats from decay. Pork especially would be butchered in the fall, and to keep the meat through the winter, it would be salted down and hung in the smokehouse to cure. The smoke would season the various cuts of meat, both preserving them and flavoring their taste. Hickory was the favored wood for the process, giving its distinctive taste to the meats.
Usually built of pine, the smokehouse was not painted on the inside, and normally painted barn red on the outside, the theory being that the composition of red paint deterred bugs, which might have been an instance of wishful thinking. I have seen several red barns become infested with termites.
The structure was kept small to intensify the heat as the meat was hanging to dry. Most smokehouses were about 8 feet by 10 feet with an A roofline to allow for sufficient rafters to hold the slabs of meat, which would not be touching each other to provide for maximum exposure for the smoke to permeate the curing space.
A local farmer, one of 10 children, told me that his father raised 11 hogs each year to be able to give one, fully butchered and cured, to each child and to keep one for himself. The system was not foolproof. One year his father lost all the meat because it had not cured properly in the smokehouse, which meant the eight months feeding and growing the pigs had come to a complete failure.
Almost always, the interior side walls and roofing boards of the smokehouse developed a fuzzy texture that appeared to be like hairs, a reaction caused by the presence of the salt. The “hairs” remained whether the building was used for its original purpose or not. I have been reflecting on this topic as we have been rebuilding the roofing of our smokehouse, built shortly after the beginning of the last century.
When we moved to the farm over 50 years ago the smokehouse had all the traditional elements described above, but it had not been used for smoking for decades. The roof was rolled tarpaper, which had replaced the original wood shingles. My father replaced it with a new wood shingle roof, similar to what probably was on the building when first built. The late Garnett Scates, a man of many talents, put it on. It lasted until a tree fell on it in a thunderstorm some years later.
To replace that roof, the late Frank Jessie installed a cedar shake shingle roof, but tree damage is a constant, and it now needed repair again. We considered putting on a metal roof, which would have eliminated the tree problem, but would not have had the same aura that we thought was due such a venerable building, thus again, cedar shakes are going up.
In its annual report on endangered American buildings, the National Trust for Historic Preservation one year declared the Southern Maryland tobacco barns to be threatened, as they were disappearing across the landscape. In our time, I fear that the Virginia smokehouse is under siege as well. These buildings are important reminders of our history and customs, and as far as creative reuse goes, today they make great tool sheds and garden houses.
