parker homestead

One of my favorite summer get-away drives is the loop from Bozeman west to Norris, Montana, then north to Three Forks and home on I-90. The drive takes you past Parker Homestead State Park, an acre of land on which sits a sod-roofed shanty built in the early 1900s. It's not a replica; it's the real deal, and there are other original homestead buildings dotting the landscape in this part of Montana.

One thing that always strikes me about the original claim buildings I visit is the lack of head room. They all seem to have low door openings and a low-pitched roofline with a fairly low high point. Lack of trees on the prairie with which to build log cabins was probably one reason they were so short. Needing to heat the interior space was no doubt another.

For some reason, the replica Ingalls log cabins in Pepin, Wisconsin, and near Independence, Kansas, always seem too big to me. Too tall, with too much head room, and a footprint that seems a bit too roomy and spacious. I'm not saying that they are too big (after all, we don't know the dimensions of the original cabins), but that's what they seem like to me...

If you haven't had a chance to see the PBS show "Alone in the Wilderness" or read the companion book - One Man's Wilderness, An Alaskan Odyssey - about Dick Proenneke's life, then you should make a point to do so. When I read Laura Ingalls Wilder's account of her father building his log cabin in Indian Territory, I don't quite understand the passage of time - how long it would have taken for Charles Ingalls to gather logs and do the actual notching and stacking of logs or to build the rock fireplace. All that is described in detail in Sam Keith's book written from Proenneke's own diaries. Proenneke's cabin wasn't something that went up in a few days, and I don't think Charles Ingalls' was either.

I know little about log cabin construction except for what I learned playing with Lincoln Logs. I always wanted to live in a log cabin; unfortunately I'm married to someone whose dream house is a fussy Victorian - but on the inside, it should be "so modern it hurts." Since dream houses usually are pushed aside when dealing with reality, we've settled (so far) for a series of bungalows and Craftsman-style homes with ultra-modern touches. The next house is still a mystery, and dreams do change over the years. I've started dreaming about one-room schoolhouses more than log cabins, for example. And John dreams of timber framing.

Anyway, one thing that jumped out at me when reading about Proenneke's log cabin was that his logs were only notched on one side, not on both sides like Lincoln Logs are. The notched side fits over the rounded log below, but each log remains rounded on its top side. Only one side was notched because if both sides were notched, a hollow would be created where water could collect and rot the log (doink).

In Little House on the Prairie (see Chapter 5, "The House on the Prairie"), Garth Williams illustrated the Ingalls cabin as being built with logs notched on both the upper and lower surfaces of each log. If you read Wilder's description of how the cabin was built, however, it suggests that Charles Ingalls did indeed only notch the underside of each log.
- posted by pioneergirl at 12:32 AM