A Reader Discovers Their Home Is Hand Hewn

It is always exciting to hear from readers of Bearfort Lodge.

Not too long ago I heard from the Ryans who had left a comment on a previous post– [Just purchased and starting to renovate an 1830's log "dog-trot" farm house. Can't tell you how much your articles on log restoration and chinking have helped us. We don't feel quite so overwhelmed now. Thanks.]

I contacted them to thank them for their comment, express my excitement over their project and offer further chinking information should they need it. I learned that they had purchased what they thought was a standard construction 1830s farmhouse with the desire to restore. It was when they started to dig in that they learned what they actually had was a log home….

Below is the email and photos -

Tony, thanks for your interest. We’re about two weekends into it, starting with the east bedroom, pulling off all sheet rock and most bead board. The home has two lower pens and two upper, apparently built at different times given the difference in ceiling heights. Logs appear in good shape, they’re cedar, and some are over 24″ wide. It appears they are about 7″ thick and hand hewn. We will be exposing floor joists this weekend in full.

We’ve also met with an old local fellow (late 80′s) who grew up in the home, belonged to his dad. He’s walked thru and showed us a lot of what’s original and what’s been added and when it was added. He’s the one that told us about the logs, we could’ve died. Have traced quite a bit of the history of the home, but not all, will do that later on. We know it belonged to a prominent family in the area, they owned two tobacco processing plants (made chewing/snuff/smoking), owned a saw mill and served on boards of the local bank and local schools/colleges.

There’s a poured concrete storm cellar on the west side of the home with the owner’s name and date (Oct. 1, 1913) in the header. The older fellow said that in the spring of that year a real bad “cyclone” (tornado) hit the area and rocked the house pretty good and scared the owners, so they built the shelter. My uncle and dad know the descendants of the original owners, they too still live in the general area.

When we bought the home, we didn’t know about the log structure. It caused us to completely stop and redo our original restoring plans, as you might guess. We were both excited and overwhelmed all at the same time. The price of the commercial chinking and on and on was just more than we expected, because we thought we’d just bought an old farmhouse. So, how lucky we feel to have been able to find your great information. We’re several months from being able to start the rebuilding phase, just too much to strip out and only weekends to do it. But when we get started, it’ll be homemade chinking, liquid wood and boric acid to the rescue.

The Ryans

Now that is exciting!

I’ll be checking in with the Ryans from time to time to see how the restoration is going.

UPDATE: Please take a look at the amazing restoration work the Ryans did this beautiful!

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