In 1847, a Pennsylvania couple survived a winter at twenty below zero with nothing but an axe, a canvas sack, and what they could pull from the woods — and they slept warmer in a fifty-five-degree cabin than most American homeowners do today paying four hundred dollars a month for propane. A twenty-four-inch berm of dry leaves and soil banked against the bottom logs of a cabin or a foundation costs nothing. A heavy quilted curtain backed with old wool blankets and trimmed with a weighted leather hem along the bottom edge costs about forty dollars per window. A river-tumbled granite or dense sandstone bed warmer stone costs zero if you have a creek nearby. One hundred and twenty solid concrete pavers from any home improvement store, stacked against a south-facing interior wall, run between one hundred and forty and two hundred dollars. A gallon of fresh buttermilk costs three dollars. A fifty-pound bag of hydrated lime costs twelve dollars and one batch covers four hundred square feet at three and a half cents per square foot.

And when you combine these techniques using methods the Amish in Lancaster County and Holmes County have been refining since the early seventeen hundreds, you eliminate the need to ever pay another four-hundred-twelve-dollar winter heating bill — without permits, without contractors, and without modifying a single load-bearing element of the house already standing on your property. The American residential heating fuel industry generates over one hundred and forty billion dollars in annual revenue. The American mold-resistant paint and exterior coatings industry generates another twenty-eight billion. The fiberglass insulation industry alone is worth over eleven billion. None of these industries benefits when a homeowner solves the problem with a rake, a wheelbarrow, a stack of salvaged brick, and a quart of cultured buttermilk. A 1981 study from the Solar Energy Research Institute, which became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, measured a twenty-eight percent reduction in supplemental heating costs in retrofitted homes that added just four hundred pounds of thermal mass to a south-facing interior wall. University of Vermont extension studies confirmed that a twenty-four-inch berm of dry leaves and soil reduces heat loss through the lower wall by close to forty percent. University of Minnesota extension testing in two thousand eight found that a properly sealed insulating window covering with a weighted hem reduces heat loss through a single-pane window by up to seventy-three percent. Pennsylvania utility filings from twenty nineteen show that the average homeowner pays four hundred and twelve dollars a year just to heat bedrooms that nobody occupies during the day. The 1798 Hans Herr House in Willow Street, Pennsylvania still stands today, with its original chestnut beams and original interior plaster intact, because the family washed the interior every seven years with a mixture of fresh cultured buttermilk and hydrated lime — a technique the United States Department of Agriculture began discouraging in extension bulletins after nineteen twenty-three for what the agency called vague concerns about consistency. A 1923 USDA bulletin documenting the safety of meat preserved in rendered hog lard for up to fourteen months in a cool root cellar was quietly removed from public circulation in the late nineteen seventies. National Park Service maintenance records from the restoration of the Hans Herr House document that the original deliberate ledge cut into the chimney four feet above the firebox prevented chimney fires for one hundred and seventy-two years before the building was modernized — a feature modern chimney codes prohibit in new construction because it complicates inspection. Buried in a manuscript at the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg, in a collection of farm records donated by the descendants of a Lancaster County Mennonite named Christian Brubaker, dated October eleventh, eighteen eighty-five, there is one paragraph describing a wall preservation method his grandfather brought over from Switzerland — a paragraph that explains why a wood, stone, or plaster surface treated with three parts cultured buttermilk to one part hydrated lime resists moisture, mold, mildew, and insect damage for between eight and fifteen years per application, while costing thirteen times less than the cheapest commercial mold-resistant paint on the market.


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