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The balloon frame can trace its origin to Chicago in the 1830s. Accounts vary, but the most common story is that it was first built by George Snow, a lumber magnate, as the framing for a warehouse in 1832. At the time, Chicago was on the cusp of a huge population boom - it would go from 300 residents in the early 1830s to nearly 30,000 in the 1850s, and to nearly a million in the 1890s. Heavy timber, and the labor needed to work and assemble it, was becoming difficult to find.
Timber frames are a labor-intensive building system, especially in the absence of any sort of construction machinery. The timbers themselves are heavy and require a lot of effort to move into position. And the mortise-and-tenon joints that connected them took a great deal of time and skill to create.
