Home

Advertorial

Op-Eds

articles

ghost writing

Newsletters

News Releases

my background

MLT Retrospect

Lehigh valley living

Brotherly Love Historic Trail

Stepping Back in Time

The log house was nearly 300 years old and the fire department was going to burn it for fire-fighting practice.  What would you do?

That's what Mead Shaffer did. Though he was already putting every spare hour into renovating a 1721 stone farmhouse, the 38-year-old veterinarian dropped everything to have the 18-by-30 foot log structure disassembled. In the summer of 1972, a crew of workers lifted off the squared chestnut timbers with a crane, then trucked the parts a mile to Shaffer’s property in the Pennsylvania countryside near Philadelphia. Even the foundation stone took a ride.

"I needed that job like a hole in the head," said Shaffer, whose preservation-minded friends had been in a dither over the house’s fate. At the time, Bethel Township had no organized preservation movement to advocate on behalf of the house. Anyone interested in preserving an historic structure was expected to buy it.

With the parts safely stored, Shaffer turned to other interests. Finally, in 2002, he reassembled what is now his personal colonial museum, which shares his 14-acre property with the restored Robert Booth house. Both are local magnets for tours by school groups and history lovers.

Today, Bethel Township has both an historical society and a preservation society that work in tandem to help developers find buyers willing to preserve historic properties. Shaffer helped to found both groups and is president of the latter. "Bethel is a little more educated now," says Ginny DeNenno, president of the neighboring Concord Township Historical Society and a Shaffer admirer. "Mead built up local awareness so today he might not have to do it all himself. But thank God that he did."

Shaffer’s 30-year delay aside, log-house owners should bless his initiative. Today’s modern log homes with high ceilings, vast windows and luxury appointments are all descendants of structures such as his.

The house was originally built about 1700 for a Wiltshire Quaker named Robert Southery who had arrived in Pennsylvania in 1688. The English were not familiar with log construction, noted Shaffer, so Southery probably hired nearby Swedish carpenters to do the job.

"There is a myth that all the early settlers walked into the woods with just an axe and built their own houses," he said. "In fact, they had a lot of other things to do. If there were people nearby who were experts, it made sense to hire them."

Swedes had been living along the Delaware River since 1638, when they founded a colony on the site of present-day Wilmington, Del. New Sweden lasted only until 1654, when it was taken over by the Dutch and, in 1664, by the English. But the Swedes and their ways remained. When large numbers of English Quakers began to arrive in the 1680s, they found numerous examples of log construction.

In truth, they never much liked it. Log houses were better than the caves that William Penn’s first settlers dug for themselves in the high banks of the Delaware. But Penn’s settlers came disproportionately from northern England where masonry construction was the norm. In Pennsylvania, they tolerated log houses only until they could afford the stone houses and barns for which the region is still known.

In 1675, Quaker Robert Wade visited the Delaware and reported enthusiastically about its fertile soil, ample fishing and peaceful Indians. His only sour note was regarding the housing. "As to buildings," he wrote his wife, "there is little until more people come over, for the inhabitants that were here did generally build their own homes, though after a mean manner, for they fell down trees, and split them in parts, and so make up a sorry house. But here is earth enough that will make very good bricks, and stone enough of several sorts."

Even Shaffer’s stone house reflects this preference. The first owner of the property, Thomas Garrett, built a log house on the site in 1683. A subsequent owner, Robert Booth, added a stone addition about 1721. In 1810, Booth’s descendants demolished the original log section of the house and rebuilt it in stone.

Most Swedish cabins had a single room, but the Southery house follows the so-called "Penn Plan." In advertising pamphlets that Penn distributed to attract settlers to the province, he recommended a house "30 foot long and 18 foot broad…with a partition near the middle and another to divide one end of the house into two small rooms…with a loft over all. The lower floor is the ground. This may seem a mean way of building but ‘tis sufficient and safest for ordinary beginners."

The Southery house is a deluxe version of this plan. It sits on a stone foundation that provides a cellar and, above, two full floors – each divided by wooden partitions into two rooms – with an attic (or loft) "over all." Like other Penn Plan houses, it is side-gabled so that rain runs off toward the front or the rear. Doors, too, are located front and back.

Originally, the only windows were openings that were covered with boards in poor weather. Like the doors, all were located in the front and rear walls; the sides had no openings whatsoever. "It allowed for an addition on either side," said Shaffer, and was the genesis of the Philadelphia row house.

"The sash and trim were added in the mid- to late-18^th Century," said Shaffer, who guesses that this was also when the house received the clapboards that preserved its timbers through the centuries. (Annual doses of wood preservative now do the trick.) Also helping to preserve the structure were its diamond-cut beam ends. Rather than simple saddle notches, the end of each beam is cut to a point on top. Rain and snow fall off.

A three-sided stone chimneystack rises from the cellar against one exterior wall and provides back-to-back hearths in each of the house’s four main rooms. The location of the stack, said Shaffer, is another regional characteristic.

"In New England, the chimneystack went up through the middle of the house so you could get heat from all four sides," he said. "Down South, chimneys were usually bumped out of the side of the house, so heat could dissipate outside instead of inside." In the Mid-Atlantic region’s not-too-hot-and-not-too-cold climate, going up the inside of an outside wall represented a middle course.

When he brought the Southery house home in 1972, Shaffer had immediately begun re-laying the stone foundation. He’d grown up in northeastern Pennsylvania where his father had been a stone mason and the Shaffer boys his helpers.

"I picked up stone-laying by osmosis," he said. "Every available minute – vacations, Saturdays – we helped my father carry stone and set up scaffolding." When he graduated high school, Shaffer determined to put some distance between himself and stonework. In 1951, he went off to Penn State University and, later, to veterinary school in Philadelphia. In 1960, after a two-year stint in the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps, Shaffer returned to Delaware County, near Philadelphia, to set up a large-animal veterinary practice. As suburbia crept in, the practice gradually refocused on dogs and cats.

"If you’re going to stay in an area, you have to change with it," said Shaffer, who slept in his office for six years before purchasing his farm in 1966.

By the end of 1972, Shaffer had built what appeared to be a small swimming pool. The following summer he spent in bed with viral pneumonia, watching the Watergate hearings. The next year, Shaffer’s father was ill and required care. Then Shaffer needed surgery to correct leg injuries he’d suffered as a 20-year-old, leaping over a stone wall. ("There was a herd of cattle getting away on a farm where I was working in north Jersey," he explained.) At one point, Shaffer had required braces in order to walk, though a knee-replacement now allows him to take hikes.

Suddenly, a couple of decades had passed. "In the back of my mind, I had always been looking for someone to help me put the cabin back together," said Shaffer who encountered Norman Glass, a restoration contractor specializing in the colonial period, in the late 1990s. Glass looked at the heap and pronounced Shaffer "absolutely crazy."

"Mead had numbered all the timbers with a wax crayon," said Glass, "but the numbers had dried out and flaked off over the years." With everything essentially unmarked, the two men used Shaffer’s photos of the disassembly and trial-and-error to reassemble the structure. The real dilemma, though, was replacing the rotted timbers that Shaffer had discarded.

"The timbers in a log house are like interlocking fingers," said Glass. "Replace one, and it throws the whole thing off." Ultimately, he replaced a third of the timbers; oak replacements were cut to fit by hand. As historic restorations go, said Glass, a salvage rate of two-thirds is considered respectable. Inside, the partitions, doors and floor joists are mostly original.

Shortcuts? Sure. Only the downstairs floorboards are fastened with authentic rose-head nails – made by a Connecticut blacksmith for 30 cents each. Elsewhere, Glass used eight-penny nails whose heads he mashed on an anvil to resemble antique T-nails.

Meanwhile, Shaffer was busy over at the Booth house, laying a flagstone patio.

"I probably wouldn’t be here if I were married," said Shaffer, whose veterinary partner also bought a historic property and later divorced over it. "I do things to a different drummer." He has willed the property to a trust, which, he suspects, will ultimately sell it to fund other work. The property on which the log house stands was subdivided and Shaffer intends that the township historical society will eventually move in.

Log Homes Illustrated / 2005 Buyers Guide

Note: I discovered the Southery house while researching our family tree.  Cynthia, left, and our daughters are descended from Robert Southery three times!

Mark E. Dixon