Mottrom chose a site for his house on the east bank of the Coan, and like all early Virginia settlers he knew how to select the spot. Springs were numerous in this region so that it was not necessary to dig a well.
And how did he go about building a house in this wilderness, so far from any place where skilled labor, tools and bricks, glass and nails could be obtained? No records to answer this question have been uncovered to this date. Perhaps, he brought indentured servants and a few crude tools with him in the shallop.
What kind of a house did he build? It is fairly certain that he did not build a log cabin, even for a temporary shelter.
In the seventeenth century the English settlers in Virginia built log forts, log prisons and log garrison houses but they were of "logs hewn square," and they were built in the traditional Old World manner.
These early settlers mentioned living in cottages, huts and frame cabins but, so far as is known, they never said that they lived in log cabins. The American-type log cabin is believed to have developed later and in another part of the country.
Mottrom and his men may have erected temporary shelters of saplings, boughs and bark, similar to the Indian houses.
If wood was cut from the forest for his permanent home, time was needed. Locust for sills, oak for framing, heart pine and cedar were at hand, but green lumber had to be seasoned.
Mottrom may have made several trips to Jamestown or Maryland for artisans and building supplies before his new home was completed. Meanwhile, he may have brought his family to live in one of the temporary shelters.
There are no buildings surviving in Virginia that were known to have been built before 1650, therefore, no true picture of the Mottrom home can be presented.
However, there are enough facts known of the period to enable one to reconstruct a reasonably accurate picture of the first house on the Coan.
First of all--the house had to be strong, for life itself might depend upon the house. Its style was, no doubt, patterned after the architecture of England but modified by circumstances in the New World.
A framed building, one storey and a half high, with brick underpinning, and brick chimneys at either end, was the typical dwelling of Virginia about the middle of the seventeenth century. Its size would have been about forty by twenty feet, with downstairs ceilings about nine feet high.