Terrain Items - A Smokehouse

In looking for typical terrain that would have been present during the War of Jenkin's Ear (and the AWI and ACW for that matter) I have found the ubiquitous smokehouse. Colonial Williamsburg has a website that they dedicated an entire blogpost to smokehouses. It is an interesting read. Of the 88 original surviving structures of Williamsburg, twelve are smokehouses. Given the need to properly and safely prepare meat for storage, it was an item everyone would have. Or as the article puts it, "Everyone needed a smokehouse."

This makes it an ideal piece of terrain. It is a relatively small building. The example I am going for would be 8' square. In 1/100th scale that works out to just over 24mm per side. The article describes them as "Typically, these are cubical structures of wood, eight to fourteen feet square, with steep pyramidal roofs for holding in the smoke among the hanging cuts of meat."

These are simple shapes that are easily handled by Tinkercad. I have found numerous examples online. Most are Civil War era buildings. There is a historic Colonial Farm in Maryland that offers a nice one that I discovered on TripAdvisor.

This is the building that I am going to try to model. One interesting point from the Williamsburg article was a real estate notice that they had discovered. It noted that there was a 8' square smoke house listed with a house and the major selling point was the door to the smokehouse to discourage theives.

These tended to be working buildings for only a small portion of the year. Animals were slaughtered in December and packed in salt to dry then smoked. The rest of the year, the smokehouse served as storage for the meat until it was brought to the kitchens.

Speaking of kitchens, most would be separate from the main house. Especially in the South where the summer would turn the house into an oven if cooking were conducted within. They yard behind the house would be divided into a clean and working sections. The clean section would feature the kitchen and dairy while the working section would have the smokehouse and animal pens.

This is having me rethink a couple of scenarios. First with the Jekyll Island Raid scenario for the War of Jenkin's Ear supplement. Captain Carr's Hermitage plantation would have featured thse working buildings. Outhouses, a smokehouse, a kitchen, animal pens, a well, and a corn crib. What it would not have featured in 1742 was slave cabins as slavery was illegal in Georgia during this time. There would have been civilian workers present as well as the members of Captain Carr's company living there as well.

The other scenario would be for an as of yet unstarted campaign book on the run up to the Battle of Cowpens. The scenario is a battle at Hammond's Store. Unlike the previous one, there would have been a possibility of slave cabins near the store. The store would have been the home of the shopkeepers who would have had to have gardens, animals and other amenities necessary for life in the frontier.

Here is the model that I have creatd from this.