The log cabin was first brought to the new world by settlers from Sweden, where it was a traditional housing style. Many settled on the Delaware and Maryland region, and it is here that the first contemporary references to houses built of logs appear: a court record in 1662 mentions a ‘loged hows’.

As with much new world housing, log-cabins were regarded at the time as temporary and makeshift. They were built by pioneers with little or no cash, out of materials readily to hand. The expectation was that, as soon as the crops from a first harvest on newly cleared land were sold, the cabins would be demolished and replaced with timber-board houses.

It was in the 1840s that the log-cabin took definitive form. When William Henry Harrison ran for president in 1840, his opponents mocked his supposedly humble background by sneering that he lived in a log-cabin. The canny Harrison embraced the caricature, and his supporters marched with banners and floats depicting log-cabins. Daniel Webster, a long-time politician, couched his endorsement of Harrison in the same terms: ‘I was not myself born in [a log-cabin], but my elder brothers and sisters were – in the cabin… which at the close of the Revolutionary War… my father erected…this humble cabin amid the snow-drifts of New England, [and] strove, by honest labor, to acquire the means for giving to his children a better education, and elevating them to a higher condition than his own’. Within a year, the symbol had already made an appearance in literature: Natty Bumppo, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, although raised by Delaware Indians, lives in ‘a rough cabin of logs’. With this, the log-cabin was well on its way to becoming a symbol of the American spirit itself.

Twenty years later its resonance only increased with the election of Abraham Lincoln, a real log-cabin dweller, to the presidency. With his murder in 1865, the log-cabin came to represent the lost Eden that was pre-Civil War America. Lincoln’s log-cabin birthplace is on show in the Memorial Building at the Lincoln Birthplace Historic Site in Kentucky. Except that it isn’t. The cabin, like most buildings of the type, had been demolished long before Lincoln became famous. Some of the logs may have been reused in a neighboring house. That house, too, was demolished, and another house built, which in turn may or may not have used some of the original logs. It was this third building that in the 1890s toured fairs and exhibitions as Lincoln’s birthplace (and at this point some of the logs from that already-compromised building also vanished), before being installed at the Birthplace site. From such fairs and exhibitions, the log-cabin symbol seeped into the everyday life of twentieth-century suburban domesticity: 1916 saw the production of Lincoln Logs, children’s building blocks in the shape of logs (designed by the son of modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright); and tins of Log-cabin maple syrup, named in the 1880s for Lincoln’s birthplace, bore a picture of a log-cabin at least until the 1960s.

By the middle of the 19th century, railroad companies began to see opportunity in promoting the nostalgia of America's log cabin history by creating luxury log cabins as an escape for he rich. While homesteaders in the west continued using log construction for expedient shelter and survival, the affluent in the east began to escape to resorts like the Great Camps in the Adirondacks of New York and the Poconos of Pennsylvania. This symbolized a significant shift in traditional log architecture as resorts and lodges incorporated expansive and lavish designs while still maintaining the rustic appeal of the early American log buildings.

The enduring and ever reimagined tradition of log architecture has become as American as baseball, the blues, and apple pie. The modern architectural market’s appreciation for the unmatched character, beauty, and historical value of antique reclaimed wood has created the opportunity to reclaim some of North America’s first hand hewn treasures. Whether a modest escape in the woods or a luxury residence in the Yellowstone Club, modern reclaimed log designs provide direct links to another time and another way of life and tell the story of North America’s architectural heritage.