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LURE OF THE LOG CABIN: The Log Cabin Symbolizes Qualities that are Considered Uniquely American: Self-reliance, Independence, Practicality and Ingenuity. By Rose Bennett Gilbert Reprinted with permission of Country Almanac, Winter 2003
Earlier Americans were certainly barking up the right trees when they re-invented the log cabin. An import from Sweden, the log cabin concept went West with the settlers, who found an endless supply of home-building materials as they leap-frogged established communities to fearlessly stretch the outward limits of our young country.
Some four centuries later, our ancestors' necessity has become a 21st-century nicety: Today's log homes can be custom-designed for both site and lifestyle. These log homes don't raise blisters from ax-handles; they even surpass modern requirements for eco-savvy insulation. Manufacturers, like Northeastern Log Homes of Kenduskeag, Maine (800-624-2797; www.northeasternlog.com ), would astound the hard-pressed settlers with their soaring, light-filled log homes, custom-designed with the appropriate amenities for the 2004 lifestyle.
Vickie and Giles Schuckmann live in 6,000 square feet of such a log home, built five years ago in the Louisville suburb of Fern Creek, Kentucky. It was a 20-year long "love affair" in the making: "We visited an open house in a log home," Vickie recalls, and "decided then and there we'd build one some day." Perhaps it was atavistic, this desire for a log home. After all, hadn't Abe Lincoln himself made log cabins famous by growing up in the one his father built in Kentucky? Now reproduced, log for log, near Hodgenville, Kentucky, that humble cabin is a major attraction for visitors from around the world. They come in droves to view what writer David Maurer has called "an icon of our frontier heritage." The log cabin symbolizes qualities that are considered uniquely American: self-reliance, independence, practicality and ingenuity.
Not that the Schuckmanns had any plans to return to America's earlier roots when they ordered their new home. They'd simply figured out a way to "live in the woods without leaving home," as Vickie puts it. Five years later, they're still loving log home living, and all those warm, wood walls. |
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