Virginia Highlands Festival Scenes, Part One

The annual Virginia Highlands Festival is held in Abingdon, Virginia, which provides a nice setting among the old buildings in downtown Abingdon. Part of the Festival is an antiques bourse which is housed in two huge tents on the grounds of the community college. These pictures were taken at the antiques show; next installment, the arts & crafts show downtown. You can click on any picture to bring up a larger version.

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Recalling the Log Cabins of the Southern Piedmont

The following is from my friend Tom Evans, a distant kinsman through Clan Gunn, who hails from the Virginia Piedmont.

My father, sixth of the seven children of his family, was born in July, 1919, in a one-room log cabin on a rented farm near Wentworth in Rockingham County, North Carolina. A later owner of this land burned the cabin in the late 1960s to "get rid of that nuisance." It had stored farm tools for more than 30 observed years, before it was burned, and probably since the Evans family moved out of it.

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Vintage Log Cabin Joinery

Log cabin construction requires some sort of notching at the ends of the logs where they are to be stacked to form the corner joints of the "crib." The Scotch-Irish immigrants learned the craft of log construction from settlers who brought the techniques with them from Sweden and Finland. The Nordic cabin-builders used two very similar methods. The simpler method is the saddle joint, which needed few tools and but a little practice; the more complex method, fully-scribed saddle joints, required more tools and greater skill and was not used in the Backcountry. (Fully-scribed saddle joints bring the logs into full-length contact, eliminating the need for chinking.) Saddle notches could be cut with only an axe, a mallet, and a chisel. This greatly reduced the need to carry tools into the wilderness, which had great appeal to the Scotch-Irish who were moving rapidly into the Backcountry in the 18th century.

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