Renee Wilde has been fascinated by a log cabin being rebuilt near her house. She did some research and discovered an old tradition of using some pretty creative materials to fill the gaps between the logs.
I’m at Indian Mound Reserve outside of Cedarville. I’m here because I wanted to get closer. I’d been driving by this park watching the progress of an old log cabin being rebuilt. So, today I’m on my way down from the parking lot to visit the site. I run into Joe and Mike who’ve come up from Cincinnati
Joe tells me that they are here to take some pictures of the waterfalls they’ve heard about. He noticed the log cabin being worked on driving in and said, "that looks like an interesting building, too bad it’s under construction right now."
Really? ‘Cause I think that’s the cool part - it’s called chinking.
People use the term chinking to describe the whole process of filling the gaps between the logs in a cabin, but log cabin historians know that it’s a two step process.
First step: find anything on hand to fill the gap between the logs. This is where things got really creative for the original log cabin builders. Remember, Lowes wasn’t around the corner, so it was basically anything they had within carrying distance that they could stuff in the gaps: grass, straw, manure, corn cobs, mud, goat hair, underwear.
In the blog article The Messy History of Chinking, there was an actual photo of someone using a pair of fruit-of-the-looms to block a gap.
So your underwear, that grass or manure - basically any crazy and creative thing that you can grab to block those gaps - that’s called Chink. And the act of actually shoving your underwear between the gaps, that’s the ancient building tradition known as Chinking.
Now for step two. It’s known as daubing. This is the grey mixture similar to cement, which goes over the stuffed gap and creates the weather sealing. Daubing mixtures, like chinking, really have no rules, and a wide range of ingenuity has been used in some mixes.
Here are just two samples I came across:
- Two parts Portland cement, one part oakum (which is frayed roped), and one part random grass found on the ground
- One part muddy clay, one part goat hair, one part spit
Judging by the work being done on the log cabin near my house, I’d say that the art of chinking is being lost on this present generation. Because I didn’t see any signs of corn cobs, goat hair, manure...or Fruit of the Loom.
