Building the Traditional Hewn-Log Home

Image Gallery Whether you're looking for an inexpensive first home, a rustically luxurious vacation/hunting/fishing lodge, or a retirement cottage than makes a lasting statement about who you are, master logsmith Peter Gott will-in this manual- teach you the basic techniques you'll need to make that dream come true.

For homesteaders, building a log cabin is a traditonal part of the back-to-the-land movement. Owner-built log cabins make cozy, inviting homes, and maintain the rustic yet practical lifestyle that modern homesteaders are working to achieve. This detailed manual gives instructions for laying the foundation and laying of the logs, as well as a history of American log cabins, to get you on your way building a log cabin of your very own.  

The first people known for builing log cabins and erecting permanent log structures were members of prehistoric Baltic and Scandinavian tribal societies whose homelands were blanketed with dense forests of tall, straight conifers. It was also the Scandinavians who developed the technique of hewing—the squaring of the sides of logs to provide flat walls. And it was they—Swedes and Finns, to be exact—who introduced this rugged, practical form of building a log cabin to the Americas in 1638, at the first and only purely Scandinavian settlement in the British colonies, appropriately named New Sweden (in what is now Delaware).

Over the next few decades, as New Sweden came under the control of first the Dutch and later the English, the Scandinavians' construction techniques were tossed into the cultural melting pot that would soon boil over to become the United States of America.

A variety of more sophisticated forms of abode passed in and out of style as America matured, but the log cabin remained common—especially in the mountainous states—through the early 1930s, after which relatively few new log structures were built. Consequently, a possibility arose that the last few hand-tool-wielding log craftsmen might be allowed to go to their graves with their unique knowledge unshared.

Fortunately, concurrent with the New Frontier visions of the Kennedy era, a number of Americans—most of them young in years, but a few youthful only in spiritheaded back to the land in hopes of finding a lifestyle that would prove to be simpler, as well as more wholesome and meaningful, than anything available in the increasingly impersonal techno-industrial urban culture.

And so, in a migration beginning in the early 1960s, a select group of Americans began moving back to the land . . . and that journey often resulted in their settling into practical, inexpensive, easy-to-construct, owner-built log dwellings.

THE MAKING OF A MASTER

In the vanguard of that early-sixties movement was a young man possessed of a keen interest in absorbing, preserving, and passing along the folk wisdom of hewn-log building. He embraced his task with the energy born of love, and in the course of a quarter century he has not only realized his goal of keeping alive the old ways of building with logs and hand tools-he's actually managed to elevate the oncevanishing craft to the level of art.

Peter Gott and his wife, Polly, moved to the Smoky Mountains in 1961, after attending Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Inspired by Pennsylvania log builder Daniel O'Hagan (to whom Peter is quick to give credit for much of his own timber-working expertise), the Gotts purchased 40 acres of raw mountain woodland and set to work building a log cabin and creating a self-sufficient homestead in the manner of the early pioneers. They studied antique cabins and learned from neighboring old-timers about the tools and methods that had been used to build them. They felled the trees for their cabin with a crosscut saw, dragged them out behind a mule, hewed the logs with a broadax, hand-split oak shingles for the roof, and built a fieldstone fireplace and chimney.