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

When John Lloyd Wright patented a toy consisting of miniature notched logs that could be assembled into a tiny log cabin in 1920, he named it "Lincoln Logs" after America's sixteenth president, who had famously been born in a log cabin in the wilds of Kentucky. Alison K. Hoagland's The Log Cabin: An American Icon is an engaging and informative study of the idiom as both a vernacular building type and a national symbol. The well-illustrated book follows the domestic log cabin from its origins as a utilitarian form established by white settlers along the seventeenth-century eastern seaboard to its current availability in build-it-yourself kit form. Hoagland quickly dispenses with the myth that the Europeans tamed the American wilderness, noting that they were intruders, not settlers into a land that was wild but not uninhabited.

Log cabins were built as a means of architectural expediency; available trees could be felled and notched, the hewn logs stacked, and the whole roofed and made watertight in fairly quick order with few tools and fewer hands. Chapter 1, "The True Rustic Order: Log Cabins in Time and Place" examines how log cabins changed over time and from place to place. Those George Washington's soldiers built at Valley Forge, for instance, were rough and ready compared to the tidy and tight log cabins made generations earlier by the Swedish immigrants of Finnish descent in Delaware, which were in turn different from those built by Russian settlers in nineteenth-century Alaska and California. Thankfully Hoagland offers a primer, with illustrations, on log cabin construction, terminology, and cabin varieties, a useful resource for later chapters.

Log cabins were a ubiquitous part of the American frontier, a shared experience that became laden with nostalgia as soon as they were a thing of the past. Chapter 2, "Presidential Timber: The Log Cabin as a Symbol of Political Worthiness," begins with William Henry Harrison's Log Cabin Campaign of 1840, during which the log cabin was inextricably woven into the foundation myth of America. Harrison's supporters initiated the claims that log cabins sheltered Puritans at Plymouth Plantation, Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and many of the Founding Fathers. Hoagland shows how "the log cabin proved to be a versatile symbol, effective in various media," with campaign banners and whiskey bottles being emblazoned with the image and campaign meeting halls fashioned into enormous log cabins (56).

Both Lincoln's opponents and his campaigners capitalized on his journey from log cabin to President's House, but after his assassination the log cabin became a relic of his martyrdom. Hoagland unravels the complexity of the traveling Lincoln log cabins; Lincoln's birthplace cabin and various childhood cabins were put on display at world's fairs, after which many were installed permanently at what quickly became pilgrimage sites. Enterprising neighbors exploited the Lincoln log cabin image when they built teahouses and gift shops for the burgeoning tourist trade. Here, Hoagland's generous endnotes are much more helpful than a simple bibliography. Lincoln Logs were perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the national fascination with the martyred president, and their role in educating American children signifies the elevated status of log cabins in the American psyche.

What make this book so interesting is that the log cabin serves so many masters: chapters 3 and 4, "Hovels and Cottages: The Log Cabin as a Symbol of Poverty" and "Romancing the Wilderness: The Log Cabin as a Symbol of the Pioneer," address the log cabin's symbolism before and after the Civil War. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Law Olmsted portrayed slave cabins in the American South as metaphors of their evil and inhumane owners. Twentieth-century reformers who came to Appalachia used the familiar idiom when building their craft and trade schools, partly to make them less intimidating to locals and partly as homage to their Anglo-Saxon ancestors.

In chapter 4 Hoagland examines firsthand reminiscences, including those of Theodore Roosevelt, who...