With the board section of the cabin done and the wagon removed, we then moved on to the original log cabin itself. This was a one-room structure that probably sufficed for the settlers for the first winter or so before they likely built the adjacent stone house. Here it is as we start to remove the roof boards:
With the roof gone, the exposed rafters are revealed. We removed these, and like all the parts of the house, they were catalogued and placed in the back of my truck for storage to the barn on the farm. Here is Ray working on taking out the very large square nails that held them in:
Now, a roofless cabin:
Now we come to the fun part: Removing the logs. Sounds simple, right? Actually, it was. We brought in a tractor with a bucket (conveniently, we have one of these on the disassembly site and the reassembly site). We then drove the tractor up and two men would lift the log into the bucket. The tractor would then back up, pivot, and drop the log onto a waiting flat-bed trailer.
The very top logs had wooden pegs (hand-cut), which were run through holes that went all the way through the log below, and into the third log from the top.:
We then moved from front to back, side to side, removing logs as we went. As each of the logs arrived in the trailer, I received them, rolled them into position, and marked off their number in my "log" book. :)
This actually was taking very little time at all. Total disassembly (working against a deadline imposed by the landowner) was only about 3 hours. As we worked, the cabin became smaller and smaller:
And the piles on the two flatbed trailers we had assembled grew bigger and bigger:
Loading a log onto the trailer:
One of the last logs left:
Finally, it was done, and after five months of work (on and off), the cabin was now gone. The land on which it had stood for 160 years was now empty. History had been, it seems, erased from this place. And yet, if all goes according to plan, it will return in a new form. Reborn in a new place.
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