and which every Ohio boy and
girl has heard of. It would not be easy to say where or when the first
log cabin was built, but it is safe to say that it was somewhere in the
English colonies of North America, and it is certain that it became the
type of the settler's house throughout the whole middle west. It may be
called the American house, the Western house, the Ohio house. Hardly any
other house was built for a hundred years by the men who were clearing
the land for the stately mansions of our day. As long as the primeval
forests stood, the log cabin remained the woodsman's home; and not fifty
years ago, I saw log cabins newly built in one of the richest and most
prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log cabins of a finer
pattern than the first settler reared. They were of logs handsomely
shaped with the broadax; the joints between the logs were plastered with
mortar; the chimney at the end was of stone; the roof was shingled, the
windows were of glass, and the door was solid and well hung. They were
such cabins as the Christian Indians dwelt in at Gnadenhutten, and such
as were the homes of the well-to-do settlers in all the older parts of
the West. But throughout that region there were many log cabins,
mostly sunk to the uses of stables and corn cribs, of the kind that the
borderers built in the times of the Indian War, from 1750 to 1800.
They were framed of the round logs, untouched by the ax except for the
notches at the ends where they were fitted into one another; the chimney
was of small sticks stuck together with mud, and was as frail as a barn
swallow's nest; the walls were stuffed with moss, plastered with clay;
the floor was of rough boards called puncheons, riven from the block
with a heavy knife; the roof was of clapboards split from logs and laid
loosely on the rafters, and held in place with logs fastened athwart
them.

[Illustration: Ohio Cabin 162]

There is a delightful account of such a log cabin by John S. Williams,
whose father settled in the woods of Belmont County in 1800. "Our
cabin," he says, "had been raised, covered, part of the cracks chinked,
and part of the floor laid, when we moved in on Christmas day. There
had not been a stick cut except in building the cabin, which was so high
from the ground that a bear, wolf, panther, or any animal less in
size than a cow could enter without even a squeeze.... The green ash
puncheons had shrunk so as to leave cracks in the floor and d