Occasionally an entire building will need to be moved from one location to another. By building, I mean a structure with 2 or more stories and a permanent foundation, not nomadic homes, huts, tents, or outbuildings. Today, cranes, trucks, and hydralic jacks are used. However, I’ve seen photos back to 1907 showing horse teams moving large homes considerable distances. When and where was the first multi-story, permanent structure moved from its foundation to a new location? How was it accomplished?
Tain’t much, but about 1900 my high school moved their 5 story brick “Industrial Hall” a couple hundred feet with teams of oxen.
While I’d guess that there are yet earlier instances, a celebrated pre-1900 case was the “raising of Chicago.” Having famously been built on a swamp, in 1855 the city council decided to solve their sewage problem by redefining streetlevel. There followed a two decade process of lifting the existing building up to the new grade, much to the amazement of visitors. Their accounts of the city in the period invariably include tales of hotels being lifted without the guests realising and the like. In City of the Century (Touchstone, 1997), Donald Miller describes how George Pullman (later the railway guy) and his firm did it:
“Pullman’s procedure for raising large buildings was almost elegant in it’s machinelike coordination. He would have workmen dig holes into the foundation of a building and place heavy timbers under it. Each of the several hundred men was put in charge of four or more jackscrews. When all was ready, George Pullman, standing in the street, would blow a whistle, the signal for brother Albert to order the men to give each of their jacks a turn. As the building rose slowly, almost imperceptibly, it was shored up with wood pilings; and great numbers of masons, working at terrific speed, would lay new footings under it.”
With this being done as a matter of course, it also became commonplace to move the buildings horizontally, sometimes to widen a street, sometimes to take it to a better location. To judge by one of the illustrations in Mayer and Wade’s Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago, 1969), this could be done with a single horse, a big pulley and lots of log rollers.
While I’ve never seen it explicitly stated, I presume that it was the Great Fire in 1871 that put an end to the practice.
The town I grew up in was moved back in the late 1800’s when NYC decided to put a reservoir where the town was. The descriptions I’ve read talk about “horse power and soaped timber tracks”. It was a very slow process.
They moved about 65 houses. They were lifted off their foundations and moved to newly dug foundations. Here’s a decent story about it written for the town’s centennial:
http://www.hudsonriver.com/halfmoonpress/stories/0397kat.htm
One earlier example which springs to mind is the original Globe Theatre, which had originally been built as The Theatre at Blackfriars but which was transported to Southwark in 1599 to become The Globe. This however may not be quite what you had in mind, as the building was dismantled first and there is some doubt as to how far the rebuilt structure replicated the earlier layout.
I was unable to find any info online for exact details, but around a hundred years ago, the multi-story Bay Voyage Inn was transported by barge across Narragansett Bay from Newport, RI to Jamestown, RI.
Which led, of course, to the inn’s current name…
Relevant or not, let us not overlook a well-known case out of central Kansas in the year 1900, in which a one-room wooden farmhouse was lifted by a tornado (in local parlance, a “cyclone”), carried thousands of miles with one of its residents (and her pet dog) safe inside, and deposited in a populated region with only a single reported casualty. In a comment (in the Omaha Gazette-Democrat) attributed to a Mr. O. Diggs: “The nation that can manage its wind can surmount any challenge.”
Scott - Actually, I’d rather stick to relevant cases. Wizard of Oz references need not apply. 
APB - I was thinking of instances were buildings have been moved more or less intact.
It looks like Chicago, mid-1850’s is the answer, at least for the US. Industrial Revoluation and all … Anything earlier in Europe?
Well, my reasoning for suspecting earlier instances than Chicago (at the start of my post on this example) was that, in legislating to raise the grade, the city council surely took practicality into account. Without previous examples of buildings having been lifted, it seems unlikely that they’d effectively undertake to do the entire city, building-by-building. It may just possibly be the case that, after a while, having got the lifting part off pat, it was then the Chicagoans who took to moving buildings about willy-nilly. But I’d be very surprised if there are no earlier instances in the US.
If one’s going to stray into dismantling first and fiction, there’s always Merlin moving Stonehenge from Mount Killaraus in Ireland to Wiltshire.
Mrs. Fanny Trollope wrote a memoir in 1828 entitled “The Domestic Lives of the Americans.” This is a fascinating book to me, primarily because she describes so many “Americanisms” that are familiar parts of our national character even today. She noted that Americans had quite a penchant for moving houses from here to there, and mentions being startled on several occasions by the sight of a house, complete with chimney, being pulled down the road by a team of oxen.