Prologue: The Pre-History of The Cabin

October, 2008

Howdy folks!

This is a blog about a cabin, a fool (me) and an experiment in historic preservation.

I'm an 8th Generation Texan, raised-on-a-farm type of guy who has been forced - by economics only, I swear - to move to the big, ugly city. Nonetheless, I like everything rural and try to get out to the old farmstead as often as I can.

I'm a pretty big history buff and grew up in the history-rich landscape of Medina County, Texas, just west of San Antonio. The area was settled in 1844 by hardy folk from the Alsace-Lorraine area of what is now France, but which historically has been a mixture of French and German influences. The colony was founded in the late years of the Republic of Texas by Henri Castro, and its principle settlement was named after him: Castroville.

A number of other settlements were founded throughout the area, and some farmers often built stone homesteads in rural areas of the county.

In college, I travelled through Europe and saw cool, old stuff everywhere. Castles, old houses, stores and shops. Everywhere you looked, history looked back at you. I lamented the fact that we live in a disposable society here in America, and we have precious little history of our own.

It was only a few years later that I began to appreciate that we do have history here in America. History everywhere around us. As I began driving the back roads of my home county, I realized that such history was just right below our noses. Driving around past isolated old farmsteads now abandoned, I was at once excited by how much was still there but at the same time aghast at the condition of the old relics.

"That's a nice old house," I used to tell my dad as we'd pass one of the old stone Alsatian settler homes where farmers had raised families and defended themselves against raids by Comanches and Apaches. "That's a nice old house," I'd say, "I wish somebody would fix it up."

Of course, living at the time off of the salary of a journalist, I never imagined that I could be one of those somebodies. But the bug of historic preservation began to grow inside me into a contagion of passion for preserving history. Gradually, as time went by, I noticed several of the old houses that I thought should be preserved were torn down. One house in the nearby town of Quihi, which had stood since the 1850s at least, was torn down to form a rock wall outside a modern, manufactured home. Another fell down on its own accord.

I was appalled. The City of Castroville had long since recognized the importance of historic preservation, and had preserved literally hundreds of these old homes, but outside of the city, most were ignored. Those owners who did want to preserve them generally didn't have the money or the time.






I had decided that one day when I had a little bit of money, I'd do what I can to save one of these old houses. I had several in mind.

One house (to the left) I had seen in passing for years, along the side of F.M. 471 between Castroville and Rio Medina. In size and design, it was typical of the old Alsatian stone houses.

Alas, its location virtually guaranteed it could never be restored and used for any normal purpose. It sits literally fifteen feet from the side of the road. As a business or for storage, it could still be saved, but the location is too dangerous to ever contemplate as a living space.

Nonetheless, a few years ago, a new landowner began to start clearing the extensive brush which had overrun the property. Cutting down whole groves of hackberry trees, he uncovered for all the world to see a true gem - something I never even realized had existed. It wasn't just any other old house - but a log cabin dating to the very earliest days of settlement.



You see, early settlers generally didn't have a lot of time to design and construct houses. When they first arrived in their new home, the land was usually wilderness. The premium was on clearing the land and planting a crop.

Generally, then, the settlers built crude log cabins upon their first arrival, which they used for the first few, tough, hardscrabble years. Only as they began to eke out a living and become permanent dwellers did they have time to build permanent, stone houses.

In most cases, the old cabins they had build upon arrival were retained as outbuildings - barns, chicken coops or storage. Often, they were torn down and the wood recycled. Eventually, almost all vanished in the end.

But here, right before my eyes, was one of those original cabins. The stone house which had originally caught my eye was a mere successor - the permanent house they had built after a couple of years. And down the road about 200 yards was another, larger stone house. Eventually I confirmed my suspicions and found that the cabin had been replaced with the small stone house, which in turn had been replaced.

The dating of the houses will have to wait for later research to be confirmed, but the area was settled in the mid 1840s, and it is almost certain that the log cabin dates from that point. At some later juncture, an extension - made of boards - was added to the house. My forensic research - which I will discuss later - makes me think that this dates at least to the 1800s.

In September, 2007, I had just returned from Iraq (see my blog about that: http://www.blogger.com/www.aalan94.blogspot.com ) and had a small amount of money available which I had put aside as a historic house rennovation fund. My hope was to find an old house on a small bit of land, and buy that to restore as a get-away place and a writer's cabin. I had my eyes on a couple of old houses, but one day I was driving past the old log cabin when I saw the landowner out cleaning up the property.

I stopped and chatted. He was a nice enough fellow. He said he wanted to try to fix up the old stone house one day, but nodded towards the old log cabin. "I'll probably tear that one down," he said. "It can't be fixed, and I'm thinking about putting a house there."

Right there, on the spot I told him I'd buy the house to save it. There was only one catch: he wasn't parting with the land, so the house would have to be moved. We negotiated for about 30 seconds, and for $1,500, I became the owner of a piece of history.

Of course, there was never a possibility of moving a stone house. They weigh too much, they would break apart and disassembly would be impossible - you'd have to mark and categorize thousands of small stones, not to mention clean them of plaster and replace them how they had been aligned before.

But a wooden cabin was a possibility.

I took a closer look at the house. (This is after the landowner finished cutting down the trees that were practically growing through it.)

The most obvious part of the house is that it is a dog-run. This was a style common to old frontier houses throughout Texas and the South. Two separate buildings were joined by a breezeway, which kept the place cool in the winter. But in this particular case, the dog-run was an after-thought, since the log cabin was obviously built at one time and a board section of the house likely built later.

The house sits only about a mile from the Medina River - this was certainly the source of the cedar logs used in construction. All the other trees in the area - oak, mesquite and hackberry - are crooked and inadequate trees for a log cabin. The logs were likely carted to the location either by wagon or simply dragged by oxen.

The use of boards is a giveaway that the second section is much newer. Boards could be cut from trees locally or bought from lumber yards, but either way required a much more settled, organized society than the frontier would have been in the 1840s. (More on the history later).

The second thing that I noticed in my inspection of the house was its pronounced lean in the back:

This, along with the fact that the two halves of the building were not joined by anything besides the roof, argued against moving the house in one piece, and I soon came to the conclusion that the only possible thing to do was disassemble it.

Over the years, I had investigated the cost of house moving operations, and found that most such deals were out of my price range. I had already started thinking up schemes for how to take a house apart piece-by-piece, mark the pieces for reassembly, and rebuilding it.

All along the way, I decided that since I'm a relatively young guy with lots of energy, I would do as much work as possible by myself, only calling in the experts if necessary for such things as buidling a roof or plumbing or something I would likely screw up.

The fact that the building is a log cabin, of course, makes it even more appealing as a disassembly job. Once the roof is off - at least on the log half of the building - the logs can be taken apart by simply lifting them off of each other.

Driving back to Austin later that weekend, I called my brother to tell him about the project. He knew I had been thinking about something like this and when I told him I had bought the house, he was excited. He had seen it too, and liked the idea. "Cool," was his one-word response.

Later, as we would begin the arduous task of taking down the roof, I turned to my brother. "I think I misheard you that night," I told him. "I thought you said, 'Cool' but now I'm convinced that you meant to say, 'Fool.'"

Joking aside, I've embraced the project and will see it through to the end. The house will be disassembled and moved about 8 miles from its current location, to my family farm. There, when rebuilt - with a foundation and some improvements - it will become a living testament to the history of our pioneer forefathers.

Part I - The first step: Removing the Tin roof

October, 2008

The first step in tearing down the old cabin is to remove the old tin roof. Tin roofed houses are a Texas mainstay, but such roofs were not really affordable for ordinary people until the 1890s or so. Most old houses, therefore, were retrofitted with tin roofs.

Rather than go through the time and effort of tearing off the old wooden shingles that houses had used since Medival times, homeowners instead just put up the tin on top of the old shingles for an extra layer of protection from the elements.


For reasons which will become apparent later, I estimate the date of the tin roof on this house to be around 1910 or later. As you can see in the photo above, the roof - which once was silver-colored and tight-fitting - has fared poorly over the ages. But it has done its purpose - to keep the rain out - and if it had not been well-built when it was put on, the building would be in much worse shape today than it is.

In tearing down an old building - which you must do in this case to move it - the key is to disassemble it in roughly the reverse order it was put together. Although I was able to take off a few side boards on the structure, in general, I could do little until the roof was off. So that is step one.

In this phase I was assisted - as I will be for much of this project - by my brother Ray, who has infinitely more construction and destruction experience than I do. Here he is starting to take off the tin on the back side (the section previously uncovered was done so by the wind over the years).


I climbed atop the house with one crowbar to pry at the top of the tin while Ray pried on the bottom from the ladder. The pitch of the roof is very steep on the back, and less so on the front. Even so, it was very tricky to move around. The tin gave you nothing to grab onto if you should slip. Until you got to the peak of the roof, which you could either hold onto with one hand, or straddle like a horse. The latter, while not entirely comfortable, gave me the best stability.

Yee Haw!

Stacking the tin neetly to the side. It's too old and full of small holes to re-use on my new roof. Not sure what I'll use it for, but even rusted tin may one day have a use.

Once I got some of the tin off, it exposed the wood shingles beneath, which was a much better surface to work on. My combat boots - the same ones I wore in Iraq - gripped the wood well, and instead of slipping and sliding, I had a relatively stable platform from which to work. I still wasn't sure how much of the roof to trust. Beneath the shingles were some 1-inch thick cypress boards nailed to the rafters. I tried to spread out my surface area over the largest spaces possible, which both reduced slippage and made it less likely I'd fall through the roof.

Finally, the tin is off! I stand atop the stump of an old hackberry tree that was growing on the edge of the building. (Birds eat hackberry fruit, birds sit on edge of building, birds crap - hence the buidling was ringed with new hackberry trees).


The back of the house, with the tin off.


The front. Looking at this with the tin gone, I was impressed by how much better it looked. The old wooden shingles give it a kind of ginger-bread house look. Still covered by dirt and debris, the image is not sharp, but the shingles give it a handsome appearance nonetheless. I decided right then and there that the new building will not have a new tin roof - as I had originally planned - but a shingle one. Although wood shingles are hard to come across and are highly flammable, they make synthetic ones that look virtually identical.

The debris that I found between the tin and the shingles. A mixture of old leaves from the trees which used to engulf this house, acorns left by squirrels and rat droppings. Mmm. Yum.



I've swept the top part with a broom, so you can see the difference between the clean shingles (a relative term because they're literally impregnated with dirt) and the ones still covered by debris.

For some reason, the old roof had two open spaces on either side (which had been blocked by the tin). I'm guessing this was nothing more than a primitive sky light.

The wooden shingles. Wood shingles - or shakes, as they're often called - were generally made out of cedar, as these are. Note how well worn these are - they were on the building for a very long time before the tin was added on top of them. You can see that the wear is uneven. The sections covered by the overlapping shingles above are often in perfect condition, but the portion exposed is reduced to about 2/3 of its original thickness due to erosion and little rivers and valleys are carved out of the wood by decades of rainfall.

Next step: Remove the shingles.

Part II - Removing the Shingles

October, 2008

As I began to survey the wooden shingles on the house, I noticed something very interesting: they were of two distinct types. Those on the left side of the house - that above the log cabin portion, were very flat and rectangular, and though well-worn, were in some cases salvagable:


Those on the right side of the building - the frame-and-board part, were much more rough-hewn and in abysmal shape:

Furthermore, whereas the former shingles were held down with modern round nails, the latter were held down with archaic square nails, which my research shows ceased production around 1910:

Square nails

This told me a lot about how the building was built, and I therefore pieced together this likely timeline (These are rough dates):

1. 1844-1850. The log portion of the building is constructed. Based on date of Castro Colony settlement and the fact that log cabins were generally the first things built.

2. 1850-1880. The wood-and-board section of the house was built as an add-on to the original log cabin. Based on the presence of recycled wood - including one board containing an advertisement - and the presence of square nails in the structural boards.

3. 1910-1930. The roof is replaced, but only on the log section. This is based on the presence of newer shingles using round nails in that section, but also the presence of bent-over square nails left in the boards below the newer shingles. What seems apparent is that whatever use the building had, the log cabin section was more valued than the board section, and received a new roof to protect it better.

4. 1930-1950. The tin roof is added on top of both sections of the house, as well as across the breezeway.

With that, I decided to remove the shingles. Although my goal is preservation of the building, and I want to generally save the oldest parts of it, the irony is that the old shingles on the board section are virtually impossible to salvage - nine out of ten would disintegrate as I attempted to take them off. However, the newer shingles fare slightly better. I was able to save (once I got my tactics down) one in four of those shingles.

Starting to take the shingles off the peak of the North (log) part of the cabin. Because the shingles are overlapping, you have to take them off in the reverse way of that in which they were put on. So I had to start on the top and move my way down.

Because the backside of the house is very steep, I generally pried the shingles up from the front side, reaching over the back of the building.

The shingles coming off. Very, very slowly.

I then tried from another angle. Moving the ladder along the side, I worked the shingles on the edge of the house all the way down. With that accomplished, I could climb up the steep side of the house using the spaces between the roof boards for footholds, hand holds - and in some cases - a lanyard by which I lashed myself to the building to prevent a fall.

This allowed me to move much faster. Still, it took two whole days to get the shingles off the back side. I passed the time by listening to a book on tape about the American Revolution from my truck stereo below.

The next weekend, I was back out to work on the project and this time came up with a better way to get the shingles off. Before, I had been using a pry-bar or crowbar. Now, I procured a flat shovel from the farm. This, I later found out, is the recommended way to remove shingles, and it was much faster, while still allowing me to save a good number of the shingles.

Part cowboy, part frogman. The googles are necessary due to the immense amount of dirt wedged between the shingles, which blows into your face as you pull them off.


Getting under them with the shovel, I can take up to 2 or 3 rows at a time off, letting them fall to the ground.

So much for the log half of the building. For the board half, I detailed brother Ray to take on that part. Ray is not as patient or devoted to historical preservation as I. His instinct is to just destroy. So I gave him the half of the building with shingles which couldn't be salvaged anyway.

Using a flat hoe and then a two-by-four, he simply bashed the shingles off from the bottom up - a much faster, but more destructive manner of removing the roof. His way also took out the roof boards as well, whereas I was leaving them behind.

Ray knocking out shingles from inside the house.

Shingles fly as Ray hits them from beneath.

More shingles flying.

It looks like a mess, but all these shingles are loose and can just be swept off the roof.

The lean-to-section on the South side is entirely roofless.

Next comes the breezeway...

Finally, the roof is entirely off of the board section of the house. I'm leaving the boards atop the log section because that part will be the last to be torn down:

The peak was framed with rough-hewn cypress slats:

The shingles which can be salvaged are then grouped into piles:

Having removed the shingles, I transported all of the wood to the barn on our farm, where it will be stored until the house will be rebuilt. I separated the shingles into one large pile of shards and a neat stack of usable shingles. My thought was to somehow incorporate them into the design of the new building, though not on the top as they would have been used.

However, after returning to Austin, I got a phone call. A contractor restoring an old house nearby was looking for a bunch of wooden shingles. He planned to put them on the inside of a building's roof, where they would only be visible from the bottom. He offered to buy my shingles. We negotiated a price - which was more than I had hoped for, and he came and got them. The money isn't a lot, but it will help buy additional wood or supplies for the project. And I'll need a lot of that.

Part III: Removing the south section

November, 2008

The next task is to disassemble and remove the southern section, that of frame-and-board, from the house.

The idea of this project has alwasy been to rebuild the house as close as possible to the original. This may be difficult to achieve, because so much of it is rotten, termite-eaten or otherwise damaged. Nonetheless, each piece that comes off the building (excluding shingles and other small bits) is meticulously numbered for future assembly. Where the pieces are too damaged to re-use, they can nonetheless serve as patterns for their replacement.

Boards which cannot be used in their original location, but which may nonetheless be useful, will be incorporated in interior walls. For example, most of the exterior boards are heavily damaged by sun, rain, wind and time. However, these same boards when flipped over, look very well, as the damage is only superficial. Such boards can therefore be recycled for interior use, with their good sides showing, and their clones made from their exact dimensions can form exterior walls.


The reason I want to be so meticulous is shown by this combination of boards:



The board leaning on the tailgate of my pickup above is one of the interior posts. It is slotted, and a notch carved in the horizontal beam that went above a doorway. Such things would have allowed a building to be constructed with few - or in case of the log portion - no nails at all.



The boards are numbed in pencil according to a pre-arranged shceme. The log section of the house is I and the board section is II. The center breezeway (only a roof section) is III. Each vertical wall is given a letter, F, B, L, R or M for front, back, left, right and middle. Thus, the back wall of the board section of the house is IIB, and its individual boards are sketched and labled, IIB1, IIB2, IIB3, etc. If a board splits when taken down, both halves are marked as IIB1a and IIB1b.

Each board is taken down, numbered, its nails are removed, and it is placed on my truck for transport to the barn and storage.





Some pieces are taken down in units. This is IIBD, the back door on building II. Almost indistinguishable as a door without its hinges.

Removal of back side:


The removal of the back side of building II began even before the roof was off. The boards were nailed on, and there was also a strip of tin buried in the ground at the bottom which held them in. This was probably designed to prevent animals from digging underneath the house.

IIB - the back wall of building II is removed except for the frame, which is kept for structural purposes.

The next part is the wall between II and the breezeway, III. This is IIL, as viewed from the front of the house:

Mostly down:

In the picture above, you're looking at IIL from the breezeway. The II section's front roof overhang was enclosed at some point, forming a small third room, in addition to the main rooms in buildings I and II. This I refer to as IIB, for bathroom, which is what I plan to use it for ultimately. The door to IIB, which you see hanging at an angle, is held on by improvised hinges - straps from what appears to have been a belt or tack leather.


The room known as IIB led to some interesting finds, including this board above. The wood strips covering up the lettering were used to cover up the gaps between the boards, prevent wind and insects from getting in, and keeping the boards from warping unevenly. This indicated that this wall - an interior one - was once an exterior one. This confirms that IIB was an enclosure later added, not a room from the beginning.

The writing on the board says: "Use Moore and Co's No. I Shingles." It is an advertisement which may have been on a packing crate, the side of a wagon or some other place. This is obviously referring to No. 1 (a quality designation still used) roofing shingles, and it is quite likely that the shingles I had removed a few weeks before were from this company. Moore and Co. could have been a local company in Medina County, or San Antonio. Alternatively, there is still a Moore and Co. in existence that primarily sells paint.

Most intriguingly, it could have been a company out of East Texas:

http://libweb.sfasu.edu/proser/etrc/collections/forest/lutchermoore/

If I can verify that this wood comes from that company, I can date the age of the board building II as post 1877.

The wood on this wall is cypress and the entire interior wall is made of it. This wall was held up with square nails, although it appears the other walls of building II were replaced, as the boards there were nailed down with round nails. However, the structural supports had clinched square nails on them, indicating that boards had been replaced. It is likely that the boards exposed to the weather were replaced, but this one interior wall was original.

Next we move on to the South or right wall. This is an exterior wall making up the edge of the entire building:

Once the roof was removed - see Part II - this wall could come down:

My photographic record is limited here as I had left my camera in Austin that weekend. But I got a few more pictures with my cell phone. Here is II with all of the walls but the cypress-built interior wall IIM removed.

Here's another angle.

Building II is now completely down. My brother and I removed this wall and after I returned to Austin after Christmas, my brother pulled up the floor boards. This is the status of the house on Jan. 1, 2009.