The Cluxton Log House

Unlike Kentucky, Tennessee, and other states south of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians, Ohio boasts relatively few double-pen log buildings. (For those unversed in the arcane art of log-divining, a double-pen building is one which contains two structurally independent units, or pens.*) One of the Buckeye State's finest double-pen dwellings stood, appropriately enough, in one of its most "Southern" counties (geographically and culturally) — Adams — just north of West Union, the county seat. Nestled among billowing pastureland within an agriculturally deficient region known, historically, as the "white oak barrens," the house languished in obscurity and decrepitude until Stephen Kelley, president of the Adams County Historical Society, photographed it in 1977. Kelley's images found their way into Donald Hutslar's hands, and thence into two books (this and this). It's scarcely surprising, then, that state and national surveys of historic buildings neglected to include it — and shall always neglect to include it, since the house disappeared in the 1990s.

The house's front (northwest) elevation. Image by Stephen Kelley, 1977, from the collection of Donald and Jean Hutslar.

The home was an utterly classic double-pen structure — precisely the sort of building I'd expect to find within the earlier-settled portions of the Upland South. It made use of two one-and-a-half-story pens, each constructed of steeple-notched logs and adorned with a single window opening. It featured two massive rubble-stone chimneys — one exterior, and one interior (with an exposed firebox). In all likelihood, the passage between the pens was always enclosed (unlike in the case of the archetypal "dogtrot" house), and the braced-frame rear rooms, which lent the structure a "saltbox" roofline, might have been planned at the time of construction.

The rear (southeast) and side elevations. Note the square attic windows, rake boards, and cantilevered porch framing. I must say, I'm a bit baffled by the pole-mounted hoop. Was it a DIY television antenna? A massive dream-catcher? A homing device for extraterrestrial spacecraft?

Kelley, it seems, failed to photograph the interior, but he did have the foresight to sketch a floor plan, which I've adapted into a proper CAD rendering.

In some ways, the house's oddest feature was its staircase. More often than not, early inhabitants of Ohio's southern half jammed their stairways into the space between the fireplace and exterior wall. This house's builder, by contrast, placed the staircase within the "breezeway," but left it accessible only from the home's rear room. This suggests two possibilities — that (a) the building underwent a massive interior remodeling sometime in the nineteenth century, or that (b) the frame rear portion and the log pens were contemporaneous. Either possibility seems perfectly likely.

Dating the house is a tricky affair. Given its existence in Adams County, site of some of Ohio's earliest permanent settlements, it could have been a statehood-era structure. Then again, its placement on less-than-desirable land may mark it as a late survival of archaic building techniques. Tracing its ownership, alas, provides few answers. In 1880, it belonged to one S.P. Cluxton — perhaps Samuel Page Cluxton (b. 1838), a middle-aged farmer of Scots-Irish descent. It's unlikely that Samuel built or inherited the house; if mid-century census data is any indication, members of the Cluxton family lived exclusively in nearby Liberty Township, and their first place of settlement was the Brush Creek valley, several miles distant. (Apparently, Cluxton is a variant of Clugston, a "habitational name from the barony of Clugston in Wigtownshire," Scotland.)

So, the house's origin will remain a mystery — at least, until someone pays a visit to Adams County's courthouse and slogs through nineteenth-century tax records. I'll end my post with a rendering of how the house may have appeared in better days.

The house reconstructed in SketchUp, from the floor plan pictured above.

* Like all definitions, this one is subject to exception. Some of Ohio's seeming double-pen buildings — Brown County's Erastus Atkins House, for instance — are, in reality, unified structures whose rooms are divided by interlocked log walls.

Christian Sipe's Log House

Once again, Greene County provides fodder for a post — albeit a brief one.

I've known about the above abode for a few years, and I long ago included it in my list of likely log buildings. (If houses could talk, this one would holler, "Look at me! Look at my thick walls! Look at my boxy proportions! I'm log! For Pete's sake, I'm log!") Remodeling has spoiled its purity, but it remains a splendid example of early-nineteenth-century building practices in southwestern Ohio; the box cornice, rake boards, and asymmetrical facade are all traits peculiar to the period.

Yesterday, I decided to research its history. I must say, I expected to find little — perhaps the name of its owner at mid-century, and whatever information I could glean from census records and Find A Grave's ever-handy database. But I struck gold. First, I turned to an 1855 map of Greene County, which clearly labels the house with the name "N. Sipe." A quick Google Books search revealed this passage (in G.F. Robinson's 1902 History of Greene County, Ohio):

In 1856, Mr. [Noah] Sipe erected a brick house upon the old home farm, where he now resides. There was but one other house anywhere in the locality at the time the old home had been erected. The first structure was a log cabin, which was succeeded by a fine log house built when Mr. Sipe was a young lad, and is still standing, one of the mute reminders of pioneer days . . .

Eureka! Not only does Robinson mention Sipe's log house (a rarity in county histories), but he also gives a construction date (Sipe was born in 1820) and, more importantly, draws a distinction between the Sipe family's first-generation cabin and its better-finished, second-generation log house. Examples of this distinction are numerous in nineteenth-century writings, but I can't recall ever finding such a description of an extant building.

Christian Sipe (d. 1855), Noah's father and (I presume) the log house's builder, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, in 1814. Sipe spent two years with family in Clark County, Ohio, then purchased his Bath Township tract and cobbled together a cabin. Sipe spent anywhere from, say, five to ten years in this cabin, then contented himself, for the remainder of his years, with his "fine" two-story log house.

Ross County: A Peculiar Place (Part II)

This is the second post in my two-part series about the history and architecture of Ross County, Ohio.

Log Buildings

I know of nearly 100 log (and likely log) buildings in Ross County. Though found throughout the county, log structures are particularly common in the foothills east and west of Chillicothe, where the Till Plains give way to the greater Allegheny Plateau. This phenomenon is hardly unique to Ross County: elsewhere in Ohio, dense clusters of log buildings exist in similar transitional regions. It's a curious matter. I suspect that the land in these locales — being fruitful enough to attract early settlers, but infertile enough to prevent them from often rebuilding their homes — encouraged the preservation of log buildings. A now-demolished Twin Township farmhouse, owned in 1875 by Camden Cutright, could be termed the archetypal Ross County log home — a single pen structure, one-and-a-half stories in height.

Camden Cutright House; Twin Township. Razed, alas.

Ross County boasts quite a few double pen buildings, mostly barns. In Buckskin and Twin townships stood two round-log barns of remarkably similar appearance: Donald Hutslar photographed one in January 1968 (see The Architecture of Migration, plates 88, 89, and 90); the other was dismantled in 2011. So alike were these barns that I, until careful examination, regarded them as the same building! The Yeoman and Moomaw barns — both destroyed, unfortunately — featured forebays. A barn on the farm established by Joseph McCoy in 1796 or 1797 remains standing, and may predate Ohio's statehood. (McCoy erected a two-story log house (now collapsed) about 1800. That he built the barn concurrently is, I think, a reasonable conjecture.)

Round-log barn; Twin Township. Photo by Clyde Gilbert (?), circa 2011, from the Donald Hutslar collection; used courtesy of Jean Hutslar.

McCoy barn; Union Township. Likely erected between 1796 and 1811.

The county's double pen residences are, I daresay, more noteworthy than its barns. I'm aware of only five (three of which have disappeared). Superlative among them is the Joseph McConnell House, erected about 1828 and since converted into a golf course clubhouse. McConnell's home, though much-altered (and apparently damaged by fire), remains identifiable as a double pen building. A short distance southwest of the McConnell House, in the valley of Paint Creek's North Fork, stands a double pen dwelling of standard plan, with the space between its pens enclosed as a stair hall. While no doubt intact, this structure is inaccessible and derelict.

Joseph McConnell House; Chillicothe.

Another double pen house appears in the 1991 film Log Cabins and Castles: Virginia Settlers in Ohio. Hubert Wilhelm (formerly a professor of geography at Ohio University), who narrates the film, describes its location as, simply, "the Paint Valley." Though I've yet to locate this building, I'm confident it has, alas, been destroyed. Donald Hutslar includes a photo of a fourth double pen residence in The Architecture of Migration. The house, which likely stood in Huntington Township, featured half-dovetail notching and a rather wide "breezeway"; it, Hutslar writes, "burned many years ago and is known only through [the] one photograph."

Double pen house. Location unknown. Images from Log Cabins and Castles: Virginia Settlers in Ohio (1991).

Two other ex-Ross County log buildings are worth describing. Both existed on the Adena estate, established by Governor Thomas Worthington in 1798. Before commissioning Adena proper, Worthington occupied an enormous log house ("Belleview"), built in 1801 or 1802:

Two large pens . . . in the interior eighteen feet square, a story and a half high, were first raised at about twenty feet from each other. The space between was weather-boarded and plastered within. . . . Then followed a range of inferior construction, for the dining-room, kitchen, and rooms for the servants — all with half-stories above[.] . . . [This house] extended, in its length of seven or eight rooms, in nearly a direct line on the lawn some thirty yards below the steps leading to the hall door of the present residence[.] (1)

What, exactly, Worthington means by "range of inferior construction" is unclear. If the six rooms appended to the double pen portion were indeed log, the Worthington family occupied Ohio's (and, perhaps, the world's) only octuple pen building! Regrettably, "Belleview" survived only into the first quarter of the 19th century.

On the northern slope of the plateau underlying Adena was perched another log dwelling, whitewashed and encircled by a two-story porch; the plate logs extended beyond the pens to support this porch's roof. Two photos depicting this building (possibly taken between 1946 and 1953) exist in The Architecture of Migration.

Northern Miscellany

Northern Ross County — along with the valleys of Paint Creek, Walnut Creek, and the Scioto River — contains excellent farmland, and, by extension, excellent buildings. I haven't the space to prattle about all the interesting structures in this region (my post is quite long enough), so I'll mention only a few. The aforementioned Adena, Thomas Worthington's 1807 mansion, may be the best-documented of Ross County's rural buildings. Perhaps designed by Benjamin Latrobe, (2) Adena is, according to Rexford Newcomb, "a pleasant residence of southern Federal lines, built of warm-colored sandstone quarried on the place." (3) George Renick's 1804 dwelling, Paint Hill, also uses this "warm-colored" Berea sandstone.

Along the Scioto River, just north of the Pike County line, in Franklin and Jefferson townships, stand three remarkably similar brick farmhouses, built late in the Greek Revival period. Two were owned by members of the locally prominent Higby family, and date from 1855 and 1857; the other was built by Jacob Rittenour in 1852. All three houses are L-shaped, with low-pitched roofs, a profusion of chimneys, and restrained Grecian ornamentation.

Other rural Ross County residences worth mentioning are the Spencer-Cryder House (1830s; Colerain Township; razed), John Tootle House (Union Township), James Dunlap House (circa 1815; Union Township), John Moomaw House (1838; Paint Township; razed), Moore House (Springfield Township), William Blackstone House (Paxton Township), Simon Dixon House (Liberty Township), Radcliff House (Liberty Township), Vause House (1884; Liberty Township), Smiley Caldwell House (Jefferson Township; ruined), Daniel Crouse House (circa 1800; Green Township), William Miller House (1817; Green Township), Henry Slagle House (Concord Township), Cyrus Hegler House (1854; Concord Township; ruined), Washington Mains House (Buckskin Township), Jones House (Twin Township), Howard House (Twin Township), Joseph Baum House (Twin Township), and Cook House (Scioto Township). The list I've compiled could hardly be described as "exhaustive."

Southern Poverty

Those sections of Ross County lying south of the Paint Valley and east of the Scioto River are substantially less prosperous. Ohio owes much of its agricultural wealth to the Wisconsinian and Illinoian glaciers, which buried portions of its rugged terrain under a thick layer of till. Because southern and eastern Ross County escaped glaciation, their lands remain largely ill-suited for agriculture. The uplands of Huntington Township, though topographically gentle, are fairly infertile. Here, most farmland serves as pasture. To the east, near the Vinton County and Hocking County borders, the landscape becomes particularly rugged. The subsistence farms that occupied this region disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s, with the Ross-Hocking Land Utilization Project and subsequent founding of Tar Hollow State Park. A scathing passage in The County of Ross describes Harrison Township's "hillicans," the forerunners of today's "hillbillies":

Even the most lowly of the pioneer settlers did not compare in poverty and misery with the persisting element of this so-called 'society.' Some of them seem to be ignorant beyond the unlettered savage, and as 'do-less' as they are ignorant. A rude log hut or a 'dugout' in the hillside, without floor or ceiling . . . is their 'domicile.' . . . They are isolated from the world, and often from near-by neighbors of their own class, secluded in the inaccessible recesses of the hills, and eking out a miserable existence which they would not change if they could[.] (4)

The mountainous regions of Ross County remained sparsely populated until the final decades of the 19th century. Harrison Township, in 1840, contained a mere 631 inhabitants; Colerain Township — which lies directly to the north, and is nearly identical in size — contained 1,281. The 1840 census counted 1,159 residents in Huntington Township, and a trifling 582 in Franklin Township. In 1880, the same townships housed 2,400 and 1,233 people, respectively.

A place's architectural wealth (if I may coin a phrase) increases in proportion to its agricultural prosperity. Because subsistence farming predominated in Huntington, Franklin, and Harrison townships, these localities' homes were, accordingly, humble. WPA photographers canvassed Ross County during the Great Depression. The crude log houses they documented have all but disappeared.

Round-log house and shed. Location unknown. Photo by Theodor Jung, 1936, for the Resettlement Administration.

Log house. Location unknown. Photo by Theodor Jung, 1936, for the Resettlement Administration.

Round-log house. Location and date unknown. Photo from the Ohio Guide Collection, used courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society.

Most older residences in the poorer portions of Ross County date from the 20th century. In Huntington Township stand several "basement" barns (i.e., barns sunken into the ground), likely built during the New Deal era. At least one double pen log house of "dogtrot" form (with the space between its pens left open) existed near Massieville, in Scioto Township; it, no doubt, has been razed. Also in Huntington Township, at the intersection of Mount Tabor Road and Blain Highway, stands one survivor from the era of log construction.

Round-log house (likely erected in the 20th century); Huntington Township. Photo by Don O'Brien, 2011.

The counties straddling Appalachia and the verdant Till Plains — Adams, Highland, Fairfield, Perry, Licking, Knox, Richland, and, in particular, Ross — are among Ohio's most intriguing, perhaps because they contain variety. Their housing is neither uniformly grand nor monotonously modest; rather, rich and poor stand (more or less) cheek-by-jowl. A ten-minute drive separates Adena, Paint Hill, and the farmhouses of the Paint Valley from the humble dwellings of Huntington and Franklin townships. The homes erected by members of the Higby family, in Franklin Township, stand at the foot of a series of hills which, before the creation of Scioto Trail State Park, sheltered buildings of the crudest sort.

1) From Sarah Worthington's A Private Memoir of Thomas Worthington (1882), quoted in The Architecture of Migration.

2) Though most sources (including the estate's website) attribute Adena's design to Latrobe, Newcomb finds little evidence that Latrobe, in fact, planned the building. Fortescue Cuming, who visited Chillicothe a mere three years after Adena's construction, describes its designers as "two young Virginians by the name of Morris." (See Newcomb's Architecture of the Old Northwest Territory, page 63, for proper sourcing.)

3) Architecture of the Old Northwest Territory (1950), page 63.

4) I've omitted the paragraph's clumsy attempt at chiasmus.

The French and the Overhanging Plate

As I mention in a previous post, the overhanging plate (perhaps my favorite architectural enigma) is a distinctive feature of log homes in Loramie Township, Shelby County, and Wayne Township, Darke County. Two towns — Versailles and Russia — anchor this settlement. Both communities were populated largely by French immigrants, who arrived in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. (A few, apparently, fought in the Napoleonic Wars; hence the name Russia.) Hoping to learn about their use of the overhanging plate, I spent a bit of time researching the genealogy of these Frenchmen.

Thiebaud (1803–1863) and Nicholas Didier (1807–1881), prominent residents of Loramie Township, emigrated from Étueffont, France, to Shelby County in 1840 and 1851, respectively. Pierre Pepiot (1734–1839) lived in Neuvier until 1835, when he relocated to the United States and joined the French settlement near Russia, Ohio. Louis Peltier (1823–1876) left Évette-Salbert before 1848. The LeMoine and Gasson families, who settled in Darke County, hailed from Combres-sous-les-Côtes and Hennemont. The Russia-Versailles settlement's inhabitants, it seems, originated in extreme northeastern France, and reached Ohio via New Orleans and the Mississippi River. Where, then, did they learn to build log houses? No (or few) such buildings exist in Alsace, Franche-Comté, and Lorraine, whence they migrated. And New Orleans is hardly a bastion of log architecture. (1)

I suspect (but, alas, cannot prove) that the French immigrants tarried in Louisville, Cincinnati, or other sizable Ohio River cities before traveling to Shelby and Darke counties. The overhanging plate is particularly common in Kentucky, Indiana, and southwestern Ohio. If the French received an education in log construction from residents of these regions, they may well have assimilated knowledge of the overhanging plate!

1) Most of the "log" buildings the French encountered along the Mississippi River were, no doubt, of the poteaux-en-terre and poteaux-sur-sol varieties. Neither is, so far as I know, replicated in Ohio.