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An 18th-century No-Nails Survival Shelter

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Watch eighteenth-century lifestyle YouTube host and Indiana-based proprietor Jon Townsend build a “Frontiersman’s Survival Shelter” with no nails.

“The wilderness is a very harsh environment and shelter is crucial to survival. Thousands of men, women, and children ventured into the interior of North America in the 18th century. It was a wilderness, a wilderness without any support structure, without any shelter. They had to build these shelters quickly just to survive.”

He teams up to build this three wall shack, a refuge from the wilderness built from what was available: Tree trunks, strips of inner bark for rope, and what might be honey locust tree thorns, used as nails to secure the thin shingles of the tree’s outer bark.

john townsend
building a shelter
Level the 1700s-era builds up with another Townsends video: Building a log barn in Limestone, Tennessee.

Plus, more shelter and construction videos, including:
• Building a ‘bed shed’ sleeping shelter with Primitive Technology
How to Build an Igloo (1949)
• How to build with different mud recipes
How nomads put together a ger (or yurt)
• Building a wigwam, a time lapse
Log cabin time lapse: A Canadian man builds a shelter from scratch

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