Longhouses were a style of residential dwelling built by Native American First Nation peoples in various parts of North America. Sometimes separate longhouses were built for community meetings. Iroquois and the other East Coast longhouses The Iroquois (Haudenosaunee or "People of the Longhouses") who resided in the Northeastern United States as well as Eastern Canada (Ontario and Quebec) built and inhabited longhouses. These were sometimes more than in length but generally around wide. Scholars believe walls were made of sharpened and fire-hardened poles (up to 1,000 saplings for a house) driven close together into the ground. Strips of bark were woven horizontally through the lines of poles to form more or less weatherproof walls. Poles were set in the ground and braced by horizontal poles along the walls. The roof is made by bending a series of poles, resulting in an arc-shaped roof. This was covered with leaves and grasses. The frame is covered by bark that is sewn in place and layered as shingles, and reinforced by light swag. Doors were constructed at both ends and were covered with an animal hide to preserve interior warmth. Especially long longhouses had doors in the sidewalls as well. Longhouses featured fireplaces in the center for warmth. Holes were made above the hearth to let out smoke, but such smoke holes also let in rain and snow. Ventilation openings, later singly dubbed as a smoke pipe, were positioned at intervals, possibly totalling five to six along the roofing of the longhouse. Missionaries who visited these longhouses often wrote about their dark interiors. On average a typical longhouse was about and was meant to house up to twenty or more families, most of whom were matrilineally related. The people had a matrilineal kinship system, with property and inheritance passed through the maternal line. Children were born into the mother's clan. Protective palisades were built around the dwellings; these stood high, keeping the longhouse village safe. Tribes or ethnic groups in northeast North America, south and east of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, which had traditions of building longhouses include the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee): Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk. The Iroquoian Wyandot (also called Huron) and Erie also built longhouses, as did the Algonquian Lenni Lenape, who lived from western New England in Connecticut, along the lower Hudson River, and along the Delaware River and both sides of the