An Oregon Log Cabin
By Bill Hudson of Eugene, Oregon

From the Desert to Oregon.

In 1945 we moved from the California desert to an old homestead in Oregon, about ten miles up in the woods north from Cottage Grove. It was a great place for a 13 year old boy to live and explore. Two creeks to play and fish in, lots of woods, old logging roads and a water flume to explore.

There also were several old post and beam homestead houses in sad repair (falling down) with lots of old antique stuff laying around to examine and play with. If I had is all now I could make a small fortune selling it.

Two years later we were facing the the reality of being homeless because the house we were living in was being sold out from under us. It was the end of WWII and housing was nonexistent. After looking within thirty miles of us the only thing we could find was a little log cabin and two acres on my Uncle Robert's (my dad's older brother) place about three miles North of town. The cabin was near a hundred years old and it was very small and in very sad shape.

At some time earlier an attempt had been made to tear it down. The piers had all been pulled out from under the cabin but it had refused to fall. So it lay there, sort of molded into the side of the hill -- the south side about two feet lower than the north side.

All the sawn lumber had been gutted out of it by my uncle to build his small saw mill. There was only the log shell with a roof that you could see lots of daylight through. For a floor: just boulders, rocks and dirt because the floor boards and timbers had also been taken out.

Having no other options my dad bought it and the land from him for $500 and we immediately set in motion plans to rebuild it.

Me - Easter 1948, 16 years old.
This is the SW corner of the cabin. The vertical post was put in the ground to hoist the stringer logs on top of the piers. The large end of the log showing by the post is one of the stringers we hauled with the Model A.

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Gotta Start Somewhere.

First of all we had to get it back up on its feet and also needed to replace some rotted bottom logs on the north side.

The next day after the papers were signed my dad and I went up into the woods behind the place and fell several small fir trees (poles) to replace the rotten logs on the north side and for new floor beams. At this time chain saws were very new and expensive so we fell and barked the trees with a hand saw and ax and spud. I was about fourteen then and had the job of peeling off the bark from the trees with a bark spud while my dad fell and limbed them.

A bark spud is a concave chisel-like tool with a heavy handle about five feet long. It is pushed under the bark lengthwise to the log and the bark is peeled off in long strips. I had learned this process earlier in the spring when I had a job at peeling poles for a man logging telephone poles with horses. Only in the spring the bark came off easily as the sap was running. But it was now late summer and the bark was really stuck.

After getting the logs all felled, limbed, trimmed and barked we yarded them down to the cabin with our Model A car. They slid quite easy with the bark off. Now to see if we can stand it on its feet without it falling over.

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Our Model A work horse in the snow of 1949

The Oregon Log Cabin Stands on Its Own Again.

The poles are down from the woods and now to raise the cabin. We decided to start first on the north end where there were a couple of rotted logs on the bottom.

First we dug ditches under the end logs (front and back) of the cabin. Then we ran a cable in the ditch from our Model A bumper, under the front logs, through the cabin, and under the back logs.

We snaked a log under the house from front to back until it was in line to support the bottom front and back logs (sills) about two feet from the north side. We placed flat rocks in holes dug under the new cross log and placed building jacks, under the log, at each end of the new log and on top of the rocks. Then we slowly jacked the north side up about a foot.

Since the south side was already two feet lower we feared the whole cabin would come tumbling down or fall apart like Lincoln logs. But it held.

We chopped out the rotten bottom logs and slid in new logs. The second log up we had to notch at both ends, top side and bottom side, to straddle the front log ends. The protruding ends of the front and rear logs are notched to support the side logs and kept them from falling down on us while we worked. It is like lacing the fingers of both hands together, the joints between the knuckles act like the notches and make a tight fit. This notching is what holds the cabin together and makes a very strong joint.

That is why it wouldn't fall down. We also notched the top ends of the bottom log and set it in place on top of several cement piers we had placed along the length of the side. Then we carefully lowered the cabin down on its new north footing. It held.

We snaked a second log under the ends at the south side as we had done on the north side and started to jack it up. Because we had added nearly half a foot of height to the north side we now were faced with lifting the south side over two and a half feet. At best each jack would only screw up about a foot. We had to take it up by making cribbing of 4x4s until we had the side of the cabin slightly higher than we wanted it. Then we had to determine the level of the south side of the cabin.

To do this my dad cut the fittings off an old garden hose and taped in two glass tubes. He wrapped tape around the tubes about half way down from the top as a marker. Then he filled the hose with water. He anchored one end of the hose to the log at the north end so that the taped mark was even with the bottom of the bottom log. At the south side he had a stake driven in the ground and he held the hose at the top of the stake and slowly lowered the hose until the water moved to the tape mark. He transferred this mark to the stake. He did the same at the other end of the cabin. Then he ran a string from each stake at the lines marked on them. This established the height we would need for the piers.

My dad ran the cut off saw (an eight foot in diameter circular saw that ran on a track across the end of a log chute) at the shingle mill and he got permission to cut up a small cedar log into the correct length for the piers. He took the back seat out of the Model A and stacked the pier in it to bring them home.

Once holes had been dug and filled with crushed rock, the piers were set in place and shimmed to the string. Then the cabin was lowered in place. Two more stringer logs were snaked under the cabin and set on piers.

By the end of the day the cabin was standing on its own, proud and tall.

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Winter of 1949 - My dad