The cultural meaning of architectural features cannot be understood apart from their social and historical context. Accordingly, the salient features of Maine Acadian dwellings derive from traditional techniques, skills, and aesthetic values passed down and adapted by successive generations of crafts people. The builders were not generally professional carpenters, nor did they work from architectural plans. The construction details of Maine Acadian houses indicate a high level of woodworking skill. Though they are generally hidden by exterior Greek Revival or Georgian features, they help identify the special characteristics of Upper St. John Valley architecture.

Early Maine Acadian houses were small, simple, and built of logs. Many were built piËce sur piËce ‡ tenons en coulisse, a traditional construction technique featuring horizontal layers of hewn or sawn logs or planks set "piece on piece." In an Anglo- or Germanic-American log house, the logs were notched at the corners. In the Valley they were often built en coulisse. That is, tenons or tongues on each end of the logs (piËces) or planks (madriers) were inserted into vertical grooves (coulisses) in upright members at critical locations such as corners and doorways. One of the virtues of piËce sur piËce construction en coulisse was that the builder was able to use short logs or planks instead of the longer lengths needed in other log buildings. It is important to note that "piËce" is used in the Valley as shorthand term for more than one type of log construction.

The log walls of Valley houses were often chinked with local materials from the field or forest, such as flax, buckwheat chaff, peatmoss, or birchbark. This chinking was rather more like marine "caulking" than chinking of the sort familiar in other regions of the U.S. where logs are laid up with distinct gaps between them. Since the logs fit flush in piËce sur piËce construction, "oakum" made of buckwheat chaff or other materials worked well as chinking.

Brassieur and Marshall (1992) documented three corner-joining techniques in piËce sur piËce construction of the 19th century: tenons en coulisse (see above), tÍte de chien or half-dovetailing, and the "stacked and pegged" treatment found in the Van Buren, Maine, Maison Heritage (Vital Violette House) and the Roy House at the Acadian Village in Keegan, Maine. In the latter style, the dressed wall logs were held in place by trunnels (wooden pegs). The logs were sawn flush at the corners and alternately stacked one on top of the other. Each corner joint was secured by two trunnels. While one publication contains a sketch of this construction method drawn from memory (Bourque 1971: 8ñ9), an extant example of "stacked and pegged" has apparently never been field documented.

Houses were constructed near the St. John River until the middle of the 19th century, when many were moved to sites along the principal road. For example, three houses examined for Acadian Culture in Maine were apparently moved from the flats along the river: the Fred Albert, Val Violette, and Ernest Chasse houses. When houses were moved, they were often enlarged by adding one or more stories, as in the Val Violette House; by extending the walls laterally, as may have been the case in the Albert House; or by expanding both vertically and laterally. The alteration of these piËce sur piËce ‡ tenons en coulisse houses seems to have offered little challenge to Maine Acadian carpenters. In those cases of alteration that Brassieur and Marshall observed (1992), the additions were accomplished using the same precise axe and adze work and careful joinery employed in the original construction.

The typical mid-nineteenth-century Maine Acadian house had an essentially Georgian plan: two rooms deep, a central hallway, central chimney, one or one-and-one-half (rarely two) stories high, under a simple gable roof. The exterior resembled standard large New England houses of the 19th centuryówhite frame with Greek Revival detailing (cornices and pilasters). Ceilings were often paneled, and interior molding and finish often echoed the classical exterior stylistic elements.

Houses built piËce sur piËce by well-established farmers and merchants were generally covered on the exterior with planches debout, flush vertical boards. The planche debout provided insulation and finishing for a wall, when used with piËce sur piËce bearing-wall construction. They were sometimes also used on the interior. The vertical boards were usually tongue-and-groove construction and fitted tightly together. Each hand-planed or sawn board (planche galbÈe) measured about 2×8 inches. Many houses were finished with clapboards to dress up the buildings and provide an additional layer of protection and insulation. The roof frames included massive, relatively wide-spaced, square-hewn, white-pine rafters. The rafter couples were half-lapped and joined with through-trunnels at the peak. There was no ridgepole.

There was a practice of fitting "shipís knees" opposite each other in the loft or roof area of local houses to provide bracing. Shipís knees are important technological details that distinguish the construction of Valley houses. They can be seen in the Fred Albert and Morneault houses. In nautical usage, shipís knees are vital to a vesselís strength. Shipís knees are made by bisecting the lower trunk and root system of a tree to yield a piece of wood with the grain running with the curve for strength. The application of these substantial braces above the ceiling joists is unusual in house carpentry and warrants further investigation. Some Valley residents use the French term coude (elbow) instead of the English "shipís knee."

The construction of Maine Acadian houses changed as the 19th century progressed. The use of thick pit- or sash-sawn planks (madriers), set vertically or horizontally, came to replace the use of hewn logs (piËces). However, documentation of the cedar madriers in the Philias Caron House in Lavertu Settlement, Maine, indicates that walls built of horizontal madriers were sometimes joined using the tenons en coulisse method as late as the turn of the 20th century. A short segment of one of the madriers, removed during a recent modification of the house, has a tenon carefully cut into the end that fit into a vertical door frame.

Near the end of the 19th century, balloon-frame houses began to be built in greater numbers than solid-wall log and plank houses. But the locally proven Maine Acadian carpentry techniques persisted. Many Valley residents live in solid-wall houses today. The later-19th-century variants seem more square and a little taller than the mid-19th-century solid-wall houses.

Many Greek Revival houses were built throughout the Valley from the middle 19th to the early 20th century. A number of houses built in Fort Kent, Maine, west of the Fish River, have fine scroll-sawn barge boards and Gothic and Victorian detailing. Some have the appearance of the earlier Maine Acadian timber-framed houses with gable-ends turned to the street. The identification of distinctively Maine Acadian architectural features becomes more difficult with these houses.