VALLEY FORGE Study: Troops' cabins were OK

There's no evidence to support the image of a freezing, starving Army.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Although Americans are schooled on stories of the hardships endured by George Washington's troops in Valley Forge, a weeklong experiment showed the log cabins built by the troops were pretty comfortable.
Park Ranger Marc Brier and several volunteers spent Tuesday to Sunday in a replica of a Revolutionary soldiers' cabin -- in weather colder than most of the 1777 winter -- monitoring the temperature to see what it was like after several days of heating.
By Sunday afternoon, with the thermometer reading 31 degrees outside, the temperature inside the mud-and-clay structure was 64 degrees by the wall near the fireplace, 70 degrees in front of the fire, and 47 degrees by the door.
"The cabins worked," said Brier, a ranger at Valley Forge for 18 years. "[The soldiers] had a decent house to live in -- a home for the winter, a good place to come back to" after spending the day outside.
Dark and crowded
Of course, that winter home was dark and pretty cramped, with a dozen men squeezed into the 14-by-16-foot space. Food was in short supply in the winter of 1777; there wasn't enough clothing to go around; and several thousand troops died of diseases.
Still, Brier said, there is already considerable evidence countering the popular picture -- which he said was started by local amateur historians in the 1850s -- of a bedraggled, freezing and starving colonial army clinging to survival.
"We have this image of the soldiers, a few guys huddled around a campfire in the snow, instead of a professional army that was able to come in here, build 2,000 log cabins, and dig miles of trenches," Brier said. "They even built a bridge across the Schuylkill in January. If they were hurting so bad, how did they do these things?"
Brier said the men's accounts back up his findings.
From diaries
"In most of these diaries, the people that lived in the cabins say they were tolerably comfortable," Brier said. One officer even described one wall lined with books from the Philadelphia library and the other with cheese his mother had sent, concluding that "with this, we declared it quite an elegant mansion."
Brier said he was not trying to diminish the sacrifices of the Continental Army, but rather wanted to give the soldiers more credit than history has accorded them.
The soldiers, he said, "were organized. They knew what they were doing. They used the technology of the day. And they made themselves comfortable enough to take care of the rest of their duties."
Plan to test warmth
Brier and former ranger Troy Shirley came up with the plan to test the warmth of the cabins, in which rangers had lit fires for a day in the past, but never for a week. The theory was that it would be much warmer after a week of constant fire.
Brier said the fire was built about two feet into the room, behind a semicircle of hearthstones, with the chimney back in the wall. The cabins' design allowed smoke to go up the chimney, but sent heat from the coals radiating out into the room, he said.
For the experiment, temperature sensors lined the walls. Brier said one log registered 23 degrees before the fire was started, but two days later, it was 44 and by Sunday it read 50 degrees.
The crew recorded the temperatures in various bunks lining the walls. At 8 a.m. Thursday, the top bunk closest to the fire registered 45.6 degrees. The bunk farthest from the fire and closest to the door was a chilly 30 degrees.
Brier said, however, that the soldiers were much more accustomed to temperature swings and extremes than most people are today, so it would be difficult to judge the comfort levels of 1777 soldiers by 2004 standards.