Well...If it was under copyright, it's been published in only one edition back in the 40's...so I think I can post it here. (Had to find it in the stacks of papers first.)
Here's the excerpt from the "Articles of Charles Noah Dome" (1858-1945). It should help you with the plan of early houses...
"The plan of the log houses remained practically the same from pioneer days up until after the Civil War. There was a fire place in the middle of one end, a door in each side, a window in the end opposite the fire place, a window on each side of the front door, one between the fire place and the corner, and perhaps one window in the back side of the house, a stairway running up 3 or 4 steps against the side wall to a landing against the end containing the chimney, thence up against this wall to the upper floor--the part against the end wall being enclosed. This upper room or loft as it was usually called remained unfurnished, the roof being the ceiling and a 8 x 10 inch, 6-pane window sash in one end and sometimes one such in each side. The older children slept up there and it was also used as a storage room. The lower part was partitioned--one part for the living room, the other, a bed room. Some houses had porches on one side extending the whole length of the building and others on both sides. Some had part of the back porches enclosed for a kitchen."
He goes on to describe the furniture in a typical cabin, procedures commonly followed for harvest time, the size and location of a typical garden plot, and even the types of things which were grown in the garden. (Flax, for example--since it was needed to make clothing.)
As you may have found, it is VERY hard to find such detailed descriptions of these early houses--since no one evidently thought much about writing a description of them down.
So that should give you an idea about the early log cabin. Stone structures, taverns, and brick homes were a different matter entirely--and they usually indicate wealthier inhabitants.
The foundations on these cabins were usually made of stacked stone in my area--and ranged from a full foundation all the way down to a flat stone or two underneath the corners of the structure. It seems that the structures were indeed much the same in my area, as the author indicates, back to the turn of the 19th c.
Houses in the Northeast may have been different from those around here...
I've never heard of a colonial cache hidden in a cellar. Perhaps those that have been lucky enough to find one have kept their mouths shut. One reason I can think of for caches of that time period being Extremely Rare is that there was a scarcity of good coinage in circulation. One normally sees caches associated with the time period c.1900-1930.
Regards,
Buckleboy
