Log Cabins

The Stepp and the Morgan cabins at the Mountain Gateway Museum in Old Fort, NC were deconstructed and removed from their original sites and reassembled at the museum.

These are the real thing, the simple, small log cabins that are emblematic of the Appalachians. A settler with little more than an ax to fell the trees and notch the logs could put up a shelter single handed -- if he stuck to small diameter logs. There was wood in plenty and fields to be cleared. The same trees provided the wooden shakes or shingles for roofing and wood to shutter the few windows. And the land supplied the rocks for the chimney, the clay for the chinking.

These modest shelters, often one room with a sleeping/storage loft, are a far cry from some of the log homes that go up today -- massive structures with soaring ceilings, many windows, thousands of square feet of living space, exercise rooms, media rooms, bedrooms and more bedrooms.

I think of the log cabin on on our property -- Little Sylvie's cabin. It's smaller than these-- originally one room, no loft. At some point a partition was added to make a second room just large enough for a bed. About the same time, a small frame addition was built on to accommodate a kitchen -- before that, the cooking would likely have been done in the fireplace.

And in this house, Clifford and Louise raised four sons; in this house, as Louise told the story, one memorable Decoration Day, she fed Sunday dinner to some forty people in shifts. I imagine them crowding the porches and swarming in and out of the little house, gobbling up a garden's worth of beans, pone after pone of cornbread, sausage and sidemeat, maybe a stack cake, possibly two -- Louise knew there would be company coming but was surprised at the number -- sweet milk and buttermilk till there was none left in the spring box . . .

You can cram a lot of living into a small space.