NOW that we know how to make doors and door-latches, locks, bolts, and
bars, we may busy ourselves with building an American log cabin. It is all
well enough to build our shacks and shanties and camps of logs with the
bark on them, but, when one wishes to build a log cabin, one wants a house
that will last. Abraham Lincoln's log cabin is still in existence, but it
was built of logs with no bark on them. There is a two-story log house
still standing in Dayton, O.; it is said to have been built before the
town was there; but there is no bark on the logs. Bark holds moisture and
moisture creates decay by inviting fibrous and threadlike cousins of the
toadstool to grow on the damp wood and work their way into its substance.
The bark also shelters all sorts of boring insects and the boring insects
make holes through the logs which admit the rain and in the end cause
decay, so that the first thing to remember is to peel the logs of which
you propose to build the cabin. There is now, or was lately, a log cabin
on Hempstead Plains, L. I., near the road leading from Mineola to
Manhassett; it is supposed to have been built when the first white
settlers began to arrive on Long Island, but this was what was known as a
"blockhouse," a small fort. In 1906 Mr. I. P. Sapington said: "I think
that I am the only man now living who helped build General Grant's log
cabin." Grant's house was what is popularly known in the South as a
"saddle-bag" log house, or, as the old Southwestern settlers called it, a
"two-pen," the pens being two enclosures with a wide passageway or gallery
between them, one roof extending over both pens and the gallery.
General Grant was not afraid of work, and, like a good scout, was always
willing to help a neighbor. He had a team of big horses, a gray and a bay,
and the loads of cord-wood he hauled to St. Louis were so big that they
are still talked of by the old settlers. In the summer of 1854 Grant
started his log cabin, and all his neighbors turned in to help him build
his house.