The log cabin is as much an image as it is a building. It evokes thoughts of maple syrup and the American frontier. It is an important setting in the stories of real and fictional people such as Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Boone, and Uncle Tom. Perhaps because of this, people give the log cabin a status no other type of house enjoys. Demolitions of 200-year-old houses suddenly stop when logs are discovered. The reality is more complex than the popular image of the log cabin in a small clearing. Log houses range from crude huts to fancy plantation houses. City houses, churches, jails, and courthouses were also built of logs. This essay addresses the complexities of the log cabin through a focus on the earliest log houses in Kentucky, and serves as an introduction to the origins, construction, forms, finish, and furnishing of log houses in the frontier and early statehood period, about 1770-1800.
Sources for the Study of Early Log Houses in Kentucky
Very few of the earliest log houses in Kentucky survive. The log houses we see now tend to be the best built ones, and those of later dates. Because house builders had long careers, and house types change slowly over time, later log buildings do offer us some information about the earlier houses. We can also learn more from archaeological investigations. Finally, we have documentary sources such as letters, drawings, contracts, and memoirs. A lot of research remains to be done, but with current knowledge, we do have some pretty clear ideas about the early log house.
The Origins of the Log House on the Kentucky Frontier
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the lack of available land in the colonies prompted people to look West towards territory occupied by Native Americans. Explorers began entering Kentucky in the 1750’s, and by the late 1770’s, European Americans, and to some extent, African Americans began moving to the area in large numbers. These colonists brought their ideas of what a house should be. These ideas varied depending on their backgrounds. In a similar way, the immigrants who colonized America in the seventeenth century brought house concepts from their countries of origin with them to the New World. However, house types had already changed in the colonies as people adapted to their new surroundings. Swedes, Finns, Germans, and other Continental Europeans brought over log building technology. The English, who didn’t build in log at home, quickly adopted the technique. Log building was well established by the time homesteaders began migrating to Kentucky in the 1770’s-1790’s, and was most common in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the source regions of most of Kentucky’s pioneers.
When they first arrived, most homesteaders kept their shelter expectations low. Establishing a farmstead on the frontier required a carefully planned and executed strategy. Building a fancy house was rarely the first thing they did. After arriving, preferably in the early spring, the pioneers began work to “improve” their land. The first task was to cut down trees, both to clear land and provide building materials. They chopped down the trees with axes (a vital tool) or girdled them (cutting a ring through the bark to kill the tree). Then there were fences to put up, fields to plow and plant, domestic animals to raise, and a house to build and furnish. The first dwelling on a site was often a simple lean-to or hut of stacked logs that could be partially dug into a hillside, or built quickly with a post-in-the-ground frame (figure 1a). Some of these structures may have been covered with bark or animal skins, taking cues from Native American dwellings. Homesteaders used such lean-tos for short periods while surveying or clearing land and building a better cabin. After they built a more substantial cabin, the old shelter could be dismantled or kept for an animal pen or storage shed.
What little we do know about the early temporary structures comes from brief descriptions in documentary records. These shelters are similar to those the first colonists built when they landed in coastal areas a century and a half earlier. William Sudduth, interviewed in the 1840’s, remembered two such structures. The first “was a cabbin raised & covered at Maysville without either being chinked, daubed, or a fire place in it,” where the family stayed for a short time at their point of entry into Kentucky. This was probably much like the log cabin in figure 1b. The second building Sudduth describes is the “camp,” a lean-to structure typical of first shelters on a homestead, which he says was “about 8 feet wide and 10 feet deep, covered over with puncheons & built up on three sides with logs.” This was similar to the lean-to shown in (figure 1a). Puncheons are thick, hand-split and unfinished boards.
Settlers usually built a single-pen log cabin for their first shelter after a lean-to. This would be one square or rectangular box (figure 1b) of stacked logs with a gable roof. Pens could be square or rectangular, and could range in size from 12 feet square to 20 x 24 feet. It typically had no weatherboarding or window glass, but may have had a stick and mud chimney. The poorest quality ones would have round logs and a dirt floor, with no fireplace like Sudduth’s cabin in Maysville. The pioneers could build such rough cabins themselves with a few simple tools. They lived in such cabins for the first year or two. As soon as possible, the homesteaders built a more substantial structure with hewn logs and a wood floor, such as the cabin shown in figure 2. This house could be improved in the coming years through additions of siding, windows, interior plaster, and enlargements such as a porch, lean-to, ell, (ells are rear additions perpendicular to the main building) or the attachment of another pen. The first crude log cabin could be retained as an attached or freestanding kitchen, slave house, laundry, barn, smoke house, or a workshop.
The popular image of the settler building a house with an ax and no nails probably has its origins in the crude first cabins. The typical house, however, required the labors of a professional builder, and possibly a mason as well. These builders used an extensive array of tools, and manufactured articles such as nails, glass, hardware, and bricks. Period records of professional builders are scant, but we know that pioneers set up varying professional trades as soon as possible. Builders looking for work saw the fast-growing frontier as a land of opportunity, as did the farmers looking for quality land. The best evidence of the building profession is in the buildings themselves. The average farmer did not have the skills or the tools needed to make window sash, join a mantle, dovetail corner joints, or frame a staircase. So he turned to the skills of carpenters and masons, paying in several forms of currency or cash equivalents (such as tobacco or whiskey) or even bartering for their services. The farmer, his family, and slaves all could contribute labor to the project of building a house, but the builder took responsibility for its design and construction.
In many cases, the first professionally built house was also replaced once again after some time by a more substantial dwelling, preferably one of frame or masonry construction. The first house could be incorporated into the new house, or left freestanding for use as an outbuilding or slave house. In some cases, it was demolished for building materials. Where very early log houses do survive to the present, they are usually enclosed within the later additions of a larger house or even a barn.
