Lincoln (NE) Journal Star Sunday, September 27, 2009 Historic homestead cabin gets careful makeover By ALGIS J. LAUKAITIS / Lincoln Journal Star BEATRICE - It is the humblest of structures - a step up from a sod house, and not quite a home. The 14-foot-by-16-foot cabin, smaller than most garages today, was home to George Washington Palmer, his wife and their 10 children. But that was more than a century ago, when one-room cabins, built by early settlers called homesteaders, dotted the tall-grass prairie like the mounds of a prairie dog town. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, settlers were given 160 acres in the wilderness by the federal government. While they improved the land for farming, they needed a place to live. Out on the vast prairie, they built sod homes. But in eastern Nebraska where there were more trees, they cut down oak, locust and hackberry and hewed them into rough logs. They filled the gaps with a mixture of mud, sand, grass or horse hair. As the homesteaders prospered, they built proper homes made of wood from the local sawmill. Cabins were kept for storing grain or sold to others who were in need of shelter. Like the buffalo, most of those early homestead cabins have disappeared from the plains, destroyed by the elements, fire or old age. But one such cabin remains - the one owned by the Palmer family. Built in 1867, it resides at the Homestead National Monument of America, about four miles west of Beatrice. It was moved there in June 1950, after it was acquired from Lawrence and Ida Mumford Epard, who had lived in it for 40 years. Today, the structure is known as the Palmer-Epard Cabin. But it's much more than four rough walls and a pitched roof. The cabin has become the icon of the monument. You see it on phone books. You see it on stamps, said Chief Ranger Merrith Baughman. Historic icons, whether they are grand edifices like the Statue of Liberty or humble one-room cabins, need to be refurbished once in a while. Even though it was rehabilitated by park employees after it was brought to the monument in 1950 from a farm 14 miles away, the Palmer-Epard Cabin was showing its age. Some of the bottom logs were rotted. The windows were in poor shape. And it needed a new limestone foundation. So earlier this month, a crew of preservation specialists from the National Park Service's Historic Preservation Training Center in Frederick, Md., came to Beatrice to begin the slow task of dismantling the cabin, moving it to another location on the monument grounds, and re-assembling the structure. Park officials talked about the project for years. It would give them the chance to not only preserve the cabin and move it out of an existing flood plain of Cub Creek, but also clear up some confusion. When people first come to the monument, they assume that the cabin was built by Daniel Freeman, the first homesteader to file a claim under the Homestead Act. It's easy to see why: For decades it sat on the Freeman's Homestead claim. A lot of people assumed it was Daniel Freeman's cabin, but it's not, Baughman said. The actual site where Freeman and his wife, Agnes, had their cabin is marked, but their cabin, which they lived in for less than 10 years, is gone, along with the wood-_frame_d house the Freemans built later. The Palmer-Epard Cabin is an important historical structure, because it shows what a homesteader in Nebraska was building at that particular time in our nation's history, Baughman said. After carefully dismantling the cabin - marking each log with a special copper tag, numbering the bricks and measuring the gaps - workers trucked the 120-plus pieces to the cabin's new home near the monument's Heritage Center. Park officials say the beautiful building, with its sweeping, plow-like roof, is a more appropriate setting for the cabin. People will be able to much better visualize what it was like to live in this home because of its new location, Baughman said. As visitors walk to the cabin, they will view a vast tall-grass prairie to the west and cornfields to the south. A small fruit tree orchard is nearby, and a community garden is planned. Both were fixtures on homesteads. Baughman said park staff hopes to use the community garden as a teaching tool to show how homesteaders practiced low-impact gardening with compost piles and heirloom plants. Brown Truslow, an exhibit specialist with the Historic Preservation Training Center, said the cabin has been through a lot in its 142-year-history. His crew of six found evidence of charred wood, possibly caused by fire, on a number of logs. We do whatever we can to save anything that we can that is historic, said Christopher Ash, a crew member from West Virginia, who was scraping a window. Three of the cabin's windows were shipped back to Maryland for repairs. Truslow said his crew is trying to preserve as much of the original cabin as possible. One of their techniques is to cut out a damaged section of log and splice in a new, almost identical section cut from trees in the area. Sometimes they had to trace an old log on a new timber to get the exact shape. A sawmill near Wymore provided the wood. But they are still looking for some natural limestone for the foundation. Our goal is to have the same appearance as when we took it down, Truslow said. The Palmer-Epard Cabin had a distinctive lean, and Brown said they are trying to duplicate that, too, as they reassemble the structure. It's part of the character of the building. It never was put together real square, Brown said. Rick Smith 2 Roadrunner Trail Placitas, NM 87043 Tel: 505-867-0047 Cell: 505-259-7161 rsmith0...@earth_link_.net