Beehive house

A beehive house is a building made from a circle of stones topped with a domed roof. The name comes from the similarity in shape to a straw beehive.

Occurrences

The ancient Bantu used this type of house, which was made with mud, poles, and cow dung. Early European settlers in the Karoo region of South Africa built similar structures known as corbelled houses.

Beehive houses are some of the oldest known structures in Ireland and Scotland. Dating from as far back as around 2000 BC and some were still being built as late as the 19th century in Apulia (south-eastern Italy).

See also

References

Media related to Beehive houses at Wikimedia Commons

Beehive House

The Beehive House is one of the two official residences of Brigham Young, an early leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons). The Beehive House gets its name from the Beehive sculpture atop the house. It was designed by Young's brother-in-law and architect of the Salt Lake Temple, Truman O. Angell, who later designed Young's other residence, the Lion House.

The Beehive house was constructed in 1854, two years before the Lion House. The Lion House is adjacent to the Beehive House, and both homes are one block east of the Salt Lake Temple and Temple Square on the street South Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is constructed of adobe and sandstone.

Young was a polygamist, and the Beehive House was designed to accommodate him and his wives and his children by them. As Young's family grew, the Lion House was built to accommodate them and became his official residence after its construction. Upon completion of the Lion House Young briefly shared The Beehive House with his senior (and only legally recognized) wife Mary Ann Angell (1803–1882), though she chose to make her home in a smaller private residence called White House on the property. Young's first polygamous wife, Lucy Ann Decker Young (1822–1890), possibly due to her seniority, became hostess of the Beehive House and lived there with her nine children.