Building the Log Cabin

Ashe County, NC - A photo essay, as remembered, by Jack Lynch

 

July 1971 That is me, eleven years old, standing in the frame space for the front door.

 

Update 2011, so how does the log cabin look today?

 

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Jack Lynch Sr., Cabin Designer and Builder

 

 

The first summer, 1968 - we simply had Charles Ellis come and bulldoze out the old farm road and level the site on the hillside. Next year we came back and dug the footers and filled them iwth field stone and cement, towering them three and a half foot deep, and subsequently about two foot high.

 

 

This was in northwestern North Carolina, in Ashe County, up Long Branch above Lansing, NC. On this farm my great-grandfather had built a wood clapboard house of wormy chestnut, it still stood, with a partial chimney, and a bit broken and rundown, most of the windows busted out. Behind the cabin is an apple orchard with trees seventy-five years old. Higher on the hill stood an old barn, and a field of tobacco, called 'baccer around these parts then.

 

My father, Jack Lynch, and his younger brothers, Ken and Mack, felling poplar trees.

 

The next year we had cut the trees out of the back forty and a team of horses was brought in to pull them down to the site. They were left to dry a year on the ground, then stripped of bark with drawknives.

 

My mother Eva Lynch working a log with a drawknife.

 

 

 

Hammering 10 penny nails into the crossed, lightly notched,logs.

 

My father had begun by reading every book he could get on log cabin building.

He also studied a plan purchased from a log kit company and considered using

that approach to the construction, but we had the land, the trees, and the familail

workforce along with the community contacts to procure the things we did not have

ourselves, such as heavy equipment, a team of horses - being an electrician made

that work a self task too, and the licensing allowed it as long as county and utility

inspection was completed.

 

 

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