The Log Cabin: An American Icon by Alison K. Hoagland (review)

Before we take a tour of Alison K. Hoagland’s The Log Cabin: An American Icon, let’s take a tour around where I live in northeast Ohio. Warren, the Trumbull County seat, boasts a reconstructed log cabin on the site of an 1804 schoolhouse and across the street from the formidably Richardsonian Romanesque revival courthouse (1897) in the square. In Mahoning County to the south, an 1816 log cabin is protected in Youngstown’s Mill Creek Park, established in 1891. The structure was originally built by Cambden Cleveland and purchased for $40.00 in 1863 by physician Timothy Woodbridge, who had it moved by oxcart to its present location. There he lived and practiced medicine until his death in 1893.

These log cabins stand as relics also of a relic-making era, the turn of the twentieth-century colonial revival. The relic making continues. As children we were told by parents and teachers that there were houses all over the region that were originally log cabins, the logs hidden by a variety of claddings. But not until I was a high school freshman did that oft-told story prove true. An abandoned house purchased in 1973 by St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Austintown (Mahoning County) was found to be—underneath its artificial brick siding—a two-story log cabin built after 1814 by or for John Harris Packard on land purchased by the township’s original proprietor, Calvin Austin. An 1819 chestnut log cabin was discovered last year in Braceville (Trumbull County), spurring a project to preserve the building and create a park connecting to the larger regional park system. Such sturdy buildings also occupy private land. The owners of one of the oldest dwellings in my hometown took apart, moved, and rebuilt a log cabin they had found and purchased in Pennsylvania. It sits in their backyard. About a mile away as the crow flies, the owners of the oldest operating farm in the township are razing century-old barns and selling off land, spurring the construction of new homes ranging from McMansions to, most recently, a new, rather shiny and bright orange log house.

The Log Cabin: An American Icon made me look anew at the many appearances of this structure on my familiar landscape. The log cabin’s ubiquity may have declined over the centuries, but as its original utility was and is amended by its political symbolism and cultural meanings, the log cabin remains fundamentally an ideopresence on the national landscape and in popular culture. As Hoagland outlines in the book’s introduction, the log cabin in what is now the United States served simultaneously as shelter and icon, its power as a national symbol intertwining with its usefulness as a “practical building,” as the “best and most efficient building type in some parts of the country” (2). Importantly, Hoagland challenges the sentimentalization of the log cabin throughout her study, considering not only buildings but their use in a national imaginary that forwards English origins and omits or diminishes other cultural groups who also constructed log cabins. She explores this prevailing narrative amid seven others, offering what she calls “counter-narratives” to demystify the log cabin myth. In a neat “Historiographical Note,” she similarly traces scholars’ quest for an origin, noting (and befitting a study of the practicality of the log cabin itself) that the simple fact that humans may “as convenient” borrow practices from each other has at times been ignored (238).

Construction techniques, tools and materials, labor, and location are the foci of the first chapter, “The True Rustic Order: Log Cabins in Time and Place.” Deeming the log cabin “the architecture of migration” (14), Hoagland reminds readers of the romanticization of the word cabin. Cabin was derogatory in the nineteenth century, referring to those log structures built of necessity and not by choice. Historic accounts (including those...