HOUSE DEMOLITION REVEALS HISTORIC LOG CABIN; PLANS BEING MADE TO MOVE STRUCTURE

No, workers aren't tearing down the log cabin at 127 S. Frederick St, although it may look like it.

What employees of Taylor Glass and Remodeling are doing is tearing down the frame house that surrounds the log cabin, while trying to keep what's left of the original structure intact.

Workers at the site have torn away enough that anyone walking down Frederick Street can see the log walls. From some angles one can see how the log structure sits on concrete block and brick posts. It's harder to see its unusual floor with dirt packed on top of logs.

For years the log cabin was hidden within a 20th-century frame house.

Workers at the site expressed amazement at the square nails they found protruding from the logs. "The actual cabin part seems a lot more solid than the house," said one of the workers, Chris Hinze.

Mandy McClure of Atlanta inherited the house when her grandmother Julie Masters died four years ago. She said she is paying for the demolition of the newer part of the house and will donate the log cabin to the city.

Sonny Eason, who grew up in the house in the 1950s and 1960s, said he knew a log cabin was buried under the wood siding and plaster walls of the two-story house when he was growing up because he could see part of the "mud lap flooring."

Once when he came home from third grade he found a stranger "looking under the house. He told (my grandmother) it was possibly the oldest house in Cape Girardeau."

Tom Neumeyer, the city councilman for Ward 2, which includes the log house, said the stranger may be right. He said experts have dated it to the 1830s. He said it seems to be a hastily built pioneer house rather than a carefully built home for town.

Neumeyer is working with an ad hoc group to find a place to move the structure and preserve it for the public to see. He said the group is bringing in an expert from out of town to see what can be done.

Since Masters' death, the structure has been abandoned and deteriorated. Although the windows were boarded up, witnesses report that squatters lived in it.

The city started legal action to tear the abandoned home down in 1994. After workers discovered the log cabin underneath, city officials put the demolition on hold and the city began working with historical-preservation societies to find a way to move the cabin and preserve it.

Neumeyer said most of the logs are well preserved because they are not in direct contact with the ground.

Eason said he hopes the ad hoc group succeeds. "It would be a loss if Cape Girardeau were to tear down its history," he said.