Ohio's Log Buildings

In 2011, after reading Donald Hutslar's book, The Architecture of Migration: Log Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750–1850, I began compiling information about my state's log buildings. Hutslar, in his introduction to The Architecture of Migration, lamented that "only a small amount of serious survey work [had] been accomplished" before 1986 (Hutslar published his treatise that year). I resigned to finish this "serious survey work" and create something hitherto unknown — an exhaustive list of Ohio's historic log buildings. For years, I stored the information in scattered folders, a .kml file, and a halfheartedly-maintained ArcGIS map. (Such chaos would have me jettisoned from any office.) Recently, I discovered Google Fusion Tables, which, it seems, is precisely what I've long sought — a way of collecting mountains of information, and displaying it in the form of a map.

For organization's sake (and to prevent the map from crashing viewers' computers), I've broken my (crude) database into 86 pages. To view a list of log buildings in a particular county, click that county's name. To view a map of log structures in that county, click the tab labeled "Map of Location." Blue circles denote extant log buildings; red circles, destroyed log buildings; green circles, extant buildings that may be log; yellow circles, demolished buildings that may have been log; and question marks, buildings whose locations I've yet to discover.

Adams; Allen; Ashland; Ashtabula; Athens; Auglaize; Belmont; Brown; Butler; Carroll; Champaign; Clark; Clermont; Clinton; Columbiana; Coshocton; Crawford; Cuyahoga; Darke; Defiance; Delaware; Erie; Fairfield; Fayette; Franklin; Fulton; Gallia; Greene; Guernsey; Hamilton; Hancock; Hardin; Harrison; Henry; Highland; Hocking; Holmes; Huron; Jackson; Jefferson; Knox; Lawrence; Licking; Logan; Lorain; Lucas; Madison; Mahoning; Marion; Medina; Meigs; Mercer; Miami; Monroe; Montgomery; Morgan; Morrow; Muskingum; Noble; Ottawa; Paulding; Perry; Pickaway; Pike; Portage; Preble; Putnam; Richland; Ross; Scioto; Seneca; Shelby; Stark; Summit; Trumbull; Tuscarawas; Union; Van Wert; Vinton; Warren; Washington; Wayne; Williams; Wood; Wyandot.

This file includes supplementary information. (Alas, Google's program permits no footnote-writing.) For those interested, here's a tabulation of buildings included in the database.

Scioto, or Sciota, or Siota? A Bit of Ohio Philology

The tribes who populated Ohio before permanent settlement by Europeans—the Delaware, Erie, Miami, Huron, and Shawnee, among others—lacked written languages and, thus, standardized spellings. White explorers and settlers transcribed their words in higgledy-piggledy fashion: Chalakatha (or Chalahgawtha) became Chillicothe; Pekowi was transformed into Piqua and Pickaway; mshkikwam evolved into Muskingum; and so on.

The name of Ohio's longest interior waterway—the Scioto River—is a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. Even though anglicized (and, one presumes, simplified from its original form), its spelling differs slightly from its pronunciation. Residents of towns and neighborhoods named for the river can be forgiven for their ire when non-Ohioans, having never heard of the stream, mispronounce it as "skee-OH-toe."

Sandy Nestor's Indian Placenames in America describes the meaning of Scioto, but fails to provide a spelling (or pronunciation) for the word from which it was derived:

It is a Shawnee word meaning 'hairy,' descriptive of the shedded hair from herds of deer that drank from the river. It was also interpreted as 'deer.'

Thomas Aquinas Burke, in Ohio Lands: A Short History, uses the spelling scionto, while Wikipedia prefers skɛnǫ·tǫ’ (which I'll transliterate as skenno-toh). According to The Wilderness Trail, "[e]arly forms of the name applied to the Scioto River included Souyote, Sonnioto, Sonontio, Cenioteaux, St. Yotoc [ha!], Chianotho, and Sikader." The corruption of the final vowel in Scioto (from "oh" to "uh"), evidently, began well before Ohio received its first settlers—indeed, well before the American colonies broke from Britain!

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, travelers and mapmakers disagreed about the proper way of writing Scioto. Joel Barlow's 1785 map of the Northwest Territory uses Scioto, the modern spelling, but Thomas Hutchins (1778) and Guy Johnson (1762) write Sioto, and Noah Webster (1806) labels the river Siota. Prince Carl Bernhard's Travels Through North America, During the Years 1825 and 1826 (admittedly a translated work) misspells Scioto as Sciota.

The currently accepted spelling, Scioto, was likely determined on March 24, 1803, when the Ohio legislature formed Scioto County from Adams County. Had the First Ohio General Assembly chosen Sciota (or another variant) instead of Scioto, our state would seem a very different place, indeed. (I write with the utmost sarcasm.)