Stave Construction

From earth-fast posts to staves

Early Scandinavian timber buildings set their posts straight into the ground. Those posts rotted. Archaeologists find their postholes beneath several stave churches - under Urnes, the remains of two earlier churches ¹.

The stave church solved the problem by lifting the frame: vertical posts (staves) stand on sill beams, and the sills rest on stone foundations, keeping the timber off the damp ground and greatly extending the buildings’ lives ¹.

How the frame works

• Ground sills: heavy timbers laid in a frame on stone footings, often notched together at the corners.
• Staves: corner posts and intermediate posts standing on the sills.
• Wall planks: vertical boards slotted into grooves in the sills and the top plates, filling between staves.
• Wall plates: timbers across the tops tying the staves together and carrying the roof.
• Bracing: in the larger churches, inner rings of tall staves with scissor braces and arched knees create a raised central nave.

The result is a timber frame that sheds water from every surface, with only stone touching the ground.

The survivors

Of perhaps 1,000-2,000 stave churches built in Norway, 28 historical examples survive, mostly from 1150-1350 ¹. Borgund - the most famous, with its stacked roofs and dragon heads - was dated by tree rings in 2019 to about 1180-1181 ¹.

A stave building in Wisconsin

Norway’s official exhibit building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was a stave-church-style hall, prefabricated in Trondheim and shipped in panels ². After the fair it went to a Lake Geneva estate later bought by William Wrigley Jr.; in 1935 his son Philip gave it to Isak Dahle, and it became the centerpiece of Little Norway in Blue Mounds, west of Madison, a folk-art museum until 2012 ². In 2015 the Norwegian municipality of Orkdal bought it, shipped it home, and rededicated it in 2017 ².

The idea for small buildings

The stave principle works for sheds, saunas, and outbuildings: set a frame of rot-resistant sills on stone or concrete piers, stand posts on the sills, and keep every board’s end grain off the ground and out of splash. It’s the same idea as the stone piers under a log cabin’s sills (see Stone Foundations).

What to take from this

Stave construction stands posts on sill beams that rest on stone, keeping timber out of the ground - an advance over earlier earth-fast posts that rotted. Staves, sills, wall plates, and slotted wall planks make a frame that sheds water. Of perhaps 1,000-2,000, 28 survive in Norway, Borgund (about 1180) the best known; Wisconsin hosted Norway’s 1893 exposition stave building at Little Norway until 2015.