Should We Build This Log House

I'm on a special mission today. I'm out researching for, hey, maybe a future project. And we're here at the David Rogers Park in Wilkettville, Indiana, and we have four hewn log homes from early Indiana. This is an old, the old wine house, or one of the old wine houses from this area, probably about 1840 to 1844. It's 25 by 20 on the outside. It's got a fireplace on one side. We've got our nice, beautiful hewn logs here. I was counting them, looking at them earlier. The largest ones were probably 20 inches in diameter. And of course, a log's gonna be 25 foot long here, 20 foot long on that side, some of them down to 16 or 18 inches in diameter. We've got one door on either side of the house, and we walk in, here's our fireplace. We've also got a staircase on this side that stretches and goes up and turns. This little corner staircase is very, very efficient use of space. Doesn't use up a lot of space on either floor. So even though it might be a little inconvenient to turn, nice use of space. We've got high ceilings, higher ceilings than I would have expected. The beams, at least the ones that are currently up here, that hold up the floor above, our joists, as they were, they are fairly small. These may be replacement ones. They are not hewn, they're sawn out. We do have one window, another window by the fireplace. This has got a lot of windows. Window on the north side, two windows on the west side along with the door. And let's go upstairs really quick. Oh, before I go up there, I don't know if you can see this. So this is the original woodwork that was in the house. This could close up. So you could close the upstairs from the downstairs, especially in the wintertime. But if you look closely, the door is maybe made of something like walnut. It's hard to say exactly. And each one of these is like tongue and groove. And you can see how the board has a little mark here. Really nice. And this board that comes across and holds it all together, tapered. This is tapered across this way and all nailed close to keep that door from warping. This is the original door. We go upstairs. And we have one large room up here. I don't know if this was separated at different times. It kind of seems like possibly there was a wall here, but I don't, it's hard to say. It could have just been open the entire time. Notice our rafters. They still have the bark on. It's just a pole and flattened on one side, hewn off flat on one side. They come up to the top, joined together. There's no center board there. And then we have our little purlins or even lath, you might call it, that's put across here and then our shingles on top. This is just a flat unadorned wall on this side because the chimney's right here. We have one low, low window on this side for getting some light on the inside. But this is just a story and a half building. So we don't have full ceilings all the way up to the edge. But you do see that this hewn log here is above my shoulder height or at my shoulder height. So very nice story and a half. And a nice one large window on this northern side to bring in enough light so that you can actually see up here. Beautiful building, still in pretty good shape, even though it is 180 years old. Obviously, they built it right in the first place. Before I leave this one, a special feature and an odd feature for these houses is this overhanging front porch. This is not typical. These two houses were made by the same person and he obviously had a different idea than most everybody else. And so maybe if we took that log and we extended it way out there, we could extend that roof down, we could create this wonderful front porch area where we could do a lot of work. And it would almost give us twice as much house because in the summertime, we could come out here and do a whole bunch of work. You could even see they had pegs, holes drilled in the walls here for some kinds of additional things on the outside of the house. There's a peg that's still sticking out here. I don't know exactly what was going on there, but some interesting stuff. Measured the logs on this, same thing. Some of them 20, maybe even 21 or 22 inches in diameter and going up to about 16 at the top. On this side, window high, window low. Now, this gets a little bit more standard feature, I believe, as we get on this side of the house, two doors on this side of the house. Two doors. Notice the mortises for the floor joists that go across. Notice their size on this outside edge. They're about a two by six or so. Here's the north side of our building. Our chimney. We can even see how this chimney came in here, how they put the board in at the edge to hold those logs in good space. And this is kind of soft. I'm pretty sure this is poplar as it was put together. Poplar grows around here, nice and big. So now, great feature. Hopefully you can see it with the sun here. Check that out. Two windows, one on either side of the chimney. I love that. While I'm here, let's talk about these two doors. And my interpretation of the two doors is that they would put a wall here. And it's hard to say from the inside whether we can find evidence of whether a wall was put in here, whether it was a temporary wall, one you could move around. But so that you could have your house have two rooms on the ground floor. And one would be a private room and the other one would be a public room. And so one of these doors would lead to your public house. The other one, your private house. My guess would be the private home being the side with the fireplace and the public without the fireplace. Just a quick guess. It could be the other way around. I don't know. I didn't, it wasn't my house. The next house up the hill here is for much later. 35 years later, we have this house. Now, it doesn't have any chimneys because by that time people were using wood stoves. And so all you would need is a little hole in the roof for your metal chimney and much less expensive, much more efficient with heating. And this one, even though it's 30 or 40 years newer is in much worse shape. The logs are really deteriorating rapidly on all the sides. They have protected the weather side here with board and board to keep it from weathering too quickly. There's the backside of the house. You can see it's even worse. I don't know how you would keep a house like this in decent shape anymore. You really would need to protect it completely. Almost build a building on top of this building to protect it if you really wanted to. I measured the logs on this side almost exactly the same as the other ones. Probably the smallest log being a 15 inch in diameter and the largest about a 20. Now we do have a problem on this side. I'm guessing that somebody in later, after the house was built, decided to put in bigger windows. And these windows, they really hurt the structure of the building. They cut through all the logs except for one single log, even the, there's no, there's only one log above the sill log at the bottom that stretches from one side to the other. That's got to really weaken that. And you can see here, this is a feature you do see in some cabins where the window and the doors together, you put the window and the door together so you don't have to break the logs up one more time. If the window is, you know, three or four feet to the west, then you would have log, window, log, door, log, window, log, edge of the building. This way, if you put the window and the door together, you don't have to have another log section. And it's a little stronger, even though the opening is wider. Again, this is a later building, but notice how much lower ceilings are, easily a foot lower. Again, this is from this area, a fairly rough looking hewing job on the inside here. It's harder to see the hewing on the outside because it's weathered so much. On the inside, this has likely been protected. So it could have had plaster and lath on this almost immediately after it was constructed, or, you know, maybe done 20 or 30 years later. It's hard to say exactly when this, you know, at what state this house was, tried to return it to its original state, but it's got smaller hewn logs up here for the floor joists. They are, again, fairly roughly hewn. So I can guess by the lower ceiling and the hewing on some of these other components that this was a less expensive home, especially 30 years later. By then, somebody might've been fairly embarrassed by a house made out of a lower cost materials or less workmanship, but nonetheless, extremely, extremely interesting, especially in that houses aren't changing that much, you know, but from between the 1840s and the 1870s, they're still making a house almost exactly the same way. This last house is from the 1850s from Whitley County. Now, we're in, I think, LaGrange County now, about an hour north of where I live. This is from the county right next to where I'm at. So they moved this particular house up to this. We live within a half a mile of Whitley County. So this comes from right around where I live. Again, highly weathered, made in the 1850s, but essentially the same building. Very, very large logs. Again, a lot of these, especially in this lower half are 20 inches. And there's a note here that some of them are oak and some are poplar. We can see that this house is made the same way as the other two in that has two doors on this side, but notice no windows, no windows on this side. They've protected this westward side again. Good idea, guys. Keep that side from weathering too much. I don't think they bothered to do it on those because they have that long overhanging porch. Pop inside here. We got some pretty rough hewing down here. We can get down to this part of the wall. Hewing's really rough. I think it's probably because it's oak and it was much more difficult. A little bit easier to hew. Ceiling's about midway between the two. Nice, hefty-sized hewn beams in this house. Now, I don't see, 1850, I don't see a chimney so that it was probably, by even in 1850, they could have, either it had a center chimney because there's a little inletting here on this log, or it had a metal chimney and a wood stove in it. But intriguing that it possibly had a brick chimney. I don't know. I love researching these hewn log homes. It seems like every region has some little quirks, little differences, but this is what hewn log homes were like right here in northern Indiana. I want to thank you for coming along on this research journey as we learn more about what it was like to live here 200 and 300 years ago. Thanks for watching.