My great-grandfather Oscar bought a shotgun house (a type of Southern row house) from my great-uncle Herman back in 1946. This was in rural Louisiana. The house was on a hill on the other side of the church road. It needed to be on my grandfather’s lot all the way across a 15 acre pasture that has a big hill in the middle of it.
The final solution involved roughly 20 large men, a bunch of pine logs used as rollers, and a half dozen mules. First they used logs as levers to pick up the house, pull the concrete block piers out from underneath it, and put it down on logs as rollers. They then with the help of the mules pulling on ropes attached to the floor beams rolled that house down the hill, across the church road, up the next hill (the hill in the pasture), and finally down to its final resting place, a bunch of men grabbing a log and running it around to the front of the house as the back of the house rolled off of it. Then when it got to its final resting place, they used pine logs to pick the house up so they could put the concrete block piers back underneath it to hold it off the ground.
That house was there for the next 12 years until it burnt down and a similar large number of relatives built a new house a bit downhill from where the old house had been. I’m always amused by that bit of family history. Just shows what people can do when they work together and think things through about what’s possible with the resources they have (the logs were borrowed on a Friday evening from a nearby sawmill where my grandfather worked, and returned before the start of business on Monday, while everybody back then had mules and rope).
