![]() Proper site selection placed the home in a location best suited to manage the farm or ranch. Site selection was aimed at providing the cabin inhabitants with both sunlight and drainage to make them better able to cope with the rigors of frontier life. The most important aspect of cabin building is the site upon which the cabin was built. Modern building methods allow this shortcut. Some log cabins were built without notches and simply nailed together, but this was not as structurally sound. Log cabins were built from logs laid horizontally and interlocked on the ends with notches (British English cog joints). Settlers often built log cabins as temporary homes to live in while constructing larger, permanent houses then they often used the log cabins as outbuildings, such as barns or chicken coops. Possibly the oldest surviving log house in the United States is the C. Few log cabins dating from the 18th century still stand, but they were often not intended as permanent dwellings. The first English settlers did not widely use log cabins, building in forms more traditional to them. The contemporaneous British settlers had no tradition of building with logs, but they quickly adopted the method. Later German and Ukrainian immigrants also used this technique. The Swedish-Finnish colonists’ quick and easy construction techniques not only remained, but spread. New Sweden only briefly existed before it became the Dutch colony of New Netherland, which later became the English colony of New York. Many of its colonists were actually Forest Finns, because Finland was part of Sweden at that time. Historians believe that the first log cabins built in North America were in the Swedish colony of Nya Sverige (New Sweden) in the Delaware River and Brandywine River valleys. In the present-day United States, settlers may have first constructed log cabins by 1638. Nails would soon be out of alignment and torn out. This is because a log cabin tends to compress slightly as it settles, over a few months or years. Log cabins are mostly constructed without the use of nails and thus derive their stability from simple stacking, with only a few dowel joints for reinforcement. Modern log cabins often feature fiberglass insulation and are sold as prefabricated kits machined in a factory, rather than hand-built in the field like ancient log cabins. Today, construction of modern log cabins as leisure homes is a fully developed industry in Finland and Sweden. Many older towns in Northern Scandinavia have been built exclusively out of log houses, which have been decorated by board paneling and wood cuttings. As no chemical reaction is involved, such as hardening of mortar, a log cabin can be erected in any weather or season. With suitable tools, a log cabin can be erected from scratch in days by a family. Log construction was especially suited to Scandinavia, where straight, tall tree trunks (pine and spruce) are readily available. The Wood Museum in Trondheim, Norway, displays fourteen different traditional profiles, but a basic form of log construction was used all over North Europe and Asia and later imported to America. It was also common to replace individual logs damaged by dry rot as necessary. Nevertheless, a medieval log cabin was considered movable property (a chattel house), as evidenced by the relocation of Espåby village in 1557: the buildings were simply disassembled, transported to a new location and reassembled. Although their origin is uncertain, the first log structures were probably being built in Northern Europe by the Bronze Age (about 3500 BC). Historically log cabin construction has its roots in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. He noted that in Pontus (modern-day northeastern Turkey), dwellings were constructed by laying logs horizontally overtop of each other and filling in the gaps with “chips and mud”. Construction with logs was described by Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio in his architectural treatise De Architectura.
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