America’s Iconic Log Cabin Has a Dark and Dirty Side Too

My great-grandparents' log cabin in Oklahoma, 1890's.

(The Daily Beast) ... One thing to know right off: Log cabins weren’t always adored here in America. Originally brought over in 1638 by settlers of short-lived New Sweden, not Pilgrims or Puritans, the log cabin was spread across the American colonies primarily by German and Scots-Irish immigrants, mostly dirt-poor folk looking for new lives in the New World. Log cabins therefore spent most of their early existence here disdained and dismissed, described as “miserable” and “wretched.”
And the people within said cabins weren’t beloved, either. Benjamin Franklin spoke for an entire generation when he told his grandson that there are “two sorts of people”: “Those who are well dress’d and live comfortably in good houses … who are respected for their virtue.” And then, “The other sort … poor, and dirty, and ragged and ignorant, and vicious, and live in miserable cabins.” In other words, log cabin living was not enviable and the people within were even less so. But that all changed around the late-1820s ... Continued