Can you imagine a log cabin standing for nearly two hundred years??? Now make that a two-story log cabin and put your great-great-great-GREAT-grandparents in it. Now take a picture… like the one shown here…

Many of you are familiar with our good friend and fellow researcher Allan, who recently packed up and moved to Washington County, PA. for the sole purpose of being closer to our collective roots. Well,  it’s been less than a month and he’s already hit genealogical paydirt… at the site of the legendary Leonard two-story log cabin!

We were always a little uncertain as to whether Jennie Leonard Hutchinson’s directions, written in the 1930s, were accurate. Roads have been reconfigured, the landscape has changed, and the directions didn’t seem like the most direct route to the site. But Allan put boots on the ground, so to speak, and drove right to it! The site is right where Jennie said it would be, on the outskirts of Ellsworth.

But that’s not the best part… the best part is… the cabin was still standing and occupied until 1996! the cabin was still standing until the 1980s! We thought it was destroyed in the 1940s. The cabin burned down 12 years ago and The cabin was torn down and there’s nothing left but an over-grown foundation, but current owner thinks the neighbors just might have some pictures of the interior!

Allen talked to the current landowner, showed him the picture you see here, confirmed that he had the right site, and drank from the Leonard spring that continues to supply water to the site today. It was too overgrown to get decent pictures of the foundation, so Allan’s going to go back this winter, when the vegetation dies back.

For those of you new to the Leonard party, this is the cabin Caleb Leonard, Jr. built and occuied in the late 1790s. Caleb outlived his son Daniel by three years and died in that cabin, attended by his grandson William, at the ripe old age of 95!  William and wife Mary, along with Caleb’s great-grandchildren Edmund, Isaac, Daniel and the rest would’ve spent their last years as a family unit in the same cabin.

Most of William’s family migrated to Ohio in 1855, but his sister Luzanna stayed behind, moving in with grandmother Lucretia (Caleb’s widow) and remaining at her side until she died in 1873… at age 96!

I get excited over the simplest things. But here’s a thought… if you’ve already calculated what it’ll take to support yourself in retirement… you might want to take a look at the longevity built into your genes… and think about building a log cabin. 

Cheers!
Rick