A Confederate camp of wood huts, another photo from Port Hudson, Louisiana. You can see on the right that a soldier used the side of his roof to hang his laundry. LOC.
The roofs on these cabins appear to me to be the same kind as were described in the source below. It was a method of using poles to hold down the shingles and enabled the builders to avoid using nails, which in rural areas were a luxury and an expense to be avoided.
"Before nails came into use, the boards were put on the roof by means of "ribs," "butting-poles," "knees," "end-stuff" and "weight-poles. Each of these words had a technical meaning in the architecture of that day which cannot be well understood without some knowledge of the construction of log cabins."
Bringing the