for the Province of New Brunswick, consisting of four
beautiful Rooms on the first Floor, highly finished. Also
two spacious lodging chambers in the second story--a
capacious dry cellar with arches &c. &c. &c.' In Upper
Canada, owing to the difficulty of obtaining building
materials, the houses of the half-pay officers were even
less pretentious. A traveller passing through the country
about Johnstown in 1792 described Sir John Johnson's
house as 'a small country lodge, neat, but as the grounds
are only beginning to be cleared, there was nothing of
interest.'

The home of the average Loyalist was a log-cabin. Sometimes
the cabin contained one room, sometimes two. Its dimensions
were as a rule no more than fourteen feet by eighteen
feet, and sometimes ten by fifteen. The roofs were
constructed of bark or small hollowed basswood logs,
overlapping one another like tiles. The windows were as
often as not covered not with glass, but with oiled paper.
The chimneys were built of sticks and clay, or rough
unmortared stones, since bricks were not procurable;
sometimes there was no chimney, and the smoke was allowed
to find its way out through a hole in the bark roof.
Where it was impossible to obtain lumber, the doors were
made of pieces of timber split into rough boards; and in
some cases the hinges and latches were made of wood.
These old log cabins, with the chinks between the logs
filled in with clay and moss, were still to be seen
standing in many parts of the country as late as fifty
years ago. Though primitive, they seem to have been not