Review: The Log Cabin: An American Icon, by Alison K. Hoagland

Abstract

Alison K. Hoagland The Log Cabin: An American Icon Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017, 292 pp., 16 color and 120 b/w illus. $29.50 (paper), ISBN 9780813942575 No American who has been to a summer camp, a national park, or Disneyland is without memories of log cabins. As Alison K. Hoagland enthusiastically points out in her new book on a familiar topic, Americans from Davy Crockett to Laura Ingalls Wilder have extolled the virtues of buildings made of logs freshly cut from the forest, constructed by hardy pioneers. Hoagland is well qualified to write about these buildings, having done stints as a National Park Service historian, professor of architectural history, and preservationist. Her 1993 book Buildings of Alaska , part of Oxford University Press's Buildings of the United States series, is full of examples of log cabins, some of which also appear in her current monograph. A number of the excellent photographs presented in The Log Cabin are her own, taken on trips all over the United States, during which she also collected postcards showing cabins as objects of popular culture. Like a good detective, Hoagland analyzes evidence from well-trodden sources as well as new discoveries, weaving it into a fresh and invigorating study that will serve as a definitive resource for some time to come. Her chapters treat everything from slave quarters to contemporary log homes in succinct, no-nonsense prose. She even includes two helpful sections on sources and historiography. Hoagland begins by examining folk images and stories from the nineteenth century that introduce the log cabin as a distinctly American house type; she then goes on to define the form and the technologies that various ethnic groups used to construct their buildings. She carefully considers the controversy over the origins of log construction in the New World, noting early examples of structures made by Swedes and Germans along the Eastern Seaboard but also discussing the log-building traditions among Native Americans, explorers on the western frontier, …