Log House

This picture was taken a long, long time ago.  Andy and I made the six-hour trip from Rushville Illinois to the Irish Wilderness several times a year.  We were building a house to live in.  The wonderful part was that it was already there when we bought the property.  We just didn't know it.  The logs for our house were enclosed in the old barn on the place.  And when we asked Clyde Simpson, who sold us the place, where they came from he told us they were from a house that was down by Brawley Spring near the Eleven Point River.  How excited we were to have some history to go with them.  We spent most of one summer taking down the old barn and carefully hauling the logs, mostly balanced on a wheelbarrow, up the hill to the house site.  We made poles to slide the logs up into position.  It took a lot of work but by November of that year we were able to pose in front of the shell of our new home.

We camped in an old Army tent during the summer.  But when November came we put a very small shelter made with barn wood together, moved a small wood stove in there and were toasty and warm. 

By the next summer we were ready to put on the roof and neighbors came for the day to help us.  Don't know what we would have done without them. Windows and a door came next.  And before long, we had a house.

We moved to the Wilderness in early summer the next year.  With a six-month old baby.  And all of our possessions in the back of a blue and white GMC truck.

Even though my new house is not logs and doesn't have the history that the log house did, I have that same happy feeling when I drive up the lane.  It looks familiar to me.  Home is home.  Wherever it may be.