William S. Wicks - Log Cabins: How to Build and Furnish Them

The location of the camp will be determined by considerations of health, taste, pleasure, and convenience. Health is paramount. Be sure that your cabin is on elevated ground, away from swales, swamp and boggy lands. Good water is indispensable. Get as near as possible to a small, swift running brook. Failing in this, be sure that you have a spring, or can secure good water by digging a pocket or hole in the ground for a reservoir.

In a lake site a little sheltering bay is desirable; it will give protection to both cabin and boat house. The water should be deep enough for a good boat landing, and at the same time have a shelving and sandy beach for an occasional bath. It is full as well, however, to have the sand beach a short distance from the camp, to give a chance for a little exercise before and after the bath.

In selecting a site, beautiful scenery must not be ignored. Those who regard the sporting instincts in man as relics of barbarism inform us that the love of scenery is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the civilized man, and that it is only within the last two hundred years that man has learned to love rocks, hills, woods, mountains, lakes, seas and clouds for their own intrinsic loveliness; and that even now the taste for scenery on a large scale is confined to comparatively few races, and comparatively few persons among them. Love lovely scenery, and in selecting your camp site pick out a commanding position. You should be able to see long distances over water as well as over a succession of hills and mountains. Certainly, the camping regions abound in so much beautiful scenery that it would be a shame if any but the most delightful points were selected.

However healthful and beautiful the camp site may be, if its approaches from the outer world are laboriously difficult and attended with too many practical discomforts, it will be found exceedingly difficult to appreciate the scenery. Camp approaches should be as accessible as possible from all places of interest and pleasure resorts. Quick time and easy transit are as important in the woods as in the city.

Be sure that in the near vicinity of your camp you have straight timber suitable for building purposes. Should your location be on a lake shore or river bank, however, it may be possible for you to float your logs from a distance. These and similar considerations must guide you in locating your camp.

Having selected your site, the next thing is to study it. Mark well its commanding and beautiful views, its background, the foreground. Study it as you would a painting, for out of your site and its environment must grow your building plan. Indeed, the structure should be the outgrowth of, and harmonize with the site, so that when your cabin is completed it shall be a new object added by the hand of man to perfect and beautify its surroundings; and the whole when viewed shall produce an agreeable effect, like harmony in music and rhythm in poetry. Hence the difficulties attending the choice of a building plan. As every man needs to be measured to get a perfectly fitting garment, so every building site needs to be considered to get a perfectly suitable cabin. The sketches found in this volume are susceptible to many changes and combinations with others. Some of them may, like a ready-made coat, fit you fairly well; still, they are only intended to assist in formulating your ideas.