Heroes, Heroines, and History: Colonial Log Cabins in the South

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Colonial Log Cabins in the South

by Denise Weimer

The first structure a settler hastily constructed at a Colonial- or Federal-era homestead site in the Southeast was usually a log cabin. Georgia woods used for this purpose included hardwoods, poplar, pine and cyprus, with cyprus more common in South Georgia. Settlers from Georgia’s Piedmont up to the Appalachians mostly used pine. Sometimes a settler might use poplar, which was lighter and easier to square, for the main beams, and pine for the rest of the house.

Basic cabins were built quickly, usually with a dirt floor and a clay-over-log chimney. The outside of the logs might even be left rounded with the bark still on. Size of a cabin could range from 15x12 to 30x18. 16x20 was also common. Suitable trees longer than twenty feet were difficult to locate, transport, and handle.

Log houses featured a more permanent design. The logs were hewn square or "skelped" with a broad axe and adze and notched with a crosscut saw. The chimney would be brick or stone. Later, an addition, or second "pen," could be built on the end of the house opposite the chimney. The breezeway connecting the two sections was called a dogtrot. Lots of work and living went on in that covered but cooler section.

The Elijah Clarke house shows double pen design.

Since log houses and cabins were made of untreated, air-dried wood, the logs would shrink as the house settled. The spaces were chinked...packed with a mixture of straw and mud or clay, or clay, sand, and horse hair. In places where the gap between logs was too large, sticks could be wedged in prior to chinking. Raised foundation construction helped keep the wood dry and reduce rot and insect damage.

Carefully crafted notches were cut at the corner of each log, thus eliminating the need for nails. Nails were costly and heavy to transport to the construction site. When notching, a settler could choose between several styles: saddle, half dove tail, and full dove tail. The saddle notch was mostly used by Cherokee and Creek Indians, while European settlers favored the other styles because they locked the logs more firmly in place. Half dovetail notches were the most stable.

Cabin floors were often swept dirt or sand. If a constructed floor existed, it might be made of hewn and hand-split planks which were pegged to the floor joist. The earliest type of flooring that appeared in log construction was known as puncheon. Logs were split in half with flat side up. Puncheons were short, thick, split or hewn-log pieces of timber roughly finished on one or more surfaces and laid directly on the ground. As time went on, puncheons were replaced by 1¼”–thick boards, tongue-and-grooved and planed by hand.

Hand-cut shakes of oak or chestnut composed the roof. In cold weather, animal skins or wooden shutters on wooden or leather hinges covered the windows.

Log cabins abound in my Colonial- and Federal-era stories, The Witness Tree, Bent Tree Bride, and The Scouts of the Georgia Frontier Series.

Denise Weimer writes historical and contemporary romance from her home in North Georgia and also serves as a freelance editor and the Acquisitions & Editorial Liaison for Wild Heart Books. A mother of two young adult daughters, she always pauses for coffee, chocolate, and old houses.