In the early 1800’s American settlers poured over the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio River Valley bringing with them the form of log home building they learned on the east side of the mountains in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania. Many of these settlers were of Scotch-Irish descent and immigrated to America from Northern Ireland in the early 1700’s. Not being woodsmen, since this region of Ireland was largely de-forested, these adventurous settlers learned how to build log cabin homes when they arrived in America from the Swedish settlers of southern New Jersey and the German settlers of Pennsylvania.

All that it took to build a log cabin was an axe and a saw, and a family could have a home. At this time, they also came up with a refinement of the one room cabin by adding an additional cabin or pen a short distance from the first one-room cabin they built. They then joined these two separate rooms with a lengthwise roof, leaving an open breezeway or dog trot in the middle.

And this is the form of this log cabin, built on the American frontier over two-hundred years ago of massive oak timbers. Carefully dismantling the individual logs, repairing them where needed, then cleaning and fumigating them, we rebuild the Ohio Dog Trot Cabin to live another life in Texas.