Marim-Dawkins House (Ye Olde Log Cabin)

Thomas Marim bought the Blackiston family farm in 1834 and became responsible for 375 acres with two log houses, a kitchen, barn, two outhouses, and two slaves. The extant one-story log house is presumably one of those then standing. It is v-notched and chinked with mortar and stone rubble. A frame addition came around 1860 or later. When Marim died in 1874, his son, Richard, only survivor of eleven children, inherited the farm. Bill Dawkins, its owner since the 1960s, stripped off the early, protective weatherboarding over the logs and removed structural walls inside, and a Center for Historic Architecture and Design investigation in 1998 showed that the house was fast deteriorating. Experts regretted the drastic transformation undertaken by Dawkins in 2003, when he replaced nearly all the walls with new wood—white oak logs cut on his property and squared by Amish workers with a portable sawmill. For him (age seventy-five) and his two helpers (ages seventy-seven and eighty-seven), however, it was a labor of love and far preferable to demolishing the termite-weakened structure.