The American Cabin
Historic American Buildings Survey, photography by Jones, Lester. Abraham Lincoln Birthplace, Hodgenville, Larue County, KY. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/ky0095/.
Although not a building type specific to America, the small cabin has nevertheless occupied a significant role in the American experience. As an expedient means of creating shelter, the log cabin could be quickly built by early colonialists using simple hand tools and materials immediately available on the frontier. It later became associated with self-reliance and a symbol co-opted by presidential candidates.
The 1840 campaign of William Henry Harrison successfully leveraged the log cabin as a metaphor of their candidate’s “humble" origins (despite the fact Harrison was, in fact, not born in a log cabin on the frontier, but on his family’s plantation in Virginia). Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1809 and this fact has become a key part of his legacy. Built to memorialize Lincoln on the centenary of his birth, the grand neoclassical Memorial Building at Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park was designed by John Russell Pope to enshrine a log cabin that was once promoted as Lincoln’s actual birth cabin, even if it is now acknowledged to merely “depict a typical cabin of the mid 19th century.”
As America industrialized, cabins became an important means of escaping from an increasingly overwhelming civilization. Henry David Thoreau famously built a cabin on the north bank of Walden Pond in order that he might “Live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Published in 1854 as a distillation of his time living in his cabin a decade earlier, Walden became a seminal text for those wanting to escape the world and engage more directly with nature. Of course, Thoreau was a Harvard-educated intellectual who was choosing to live simply only a few miles from downtown Concord and all its retail offerings. The conditions of actual pioneers living in cabins in the western territories were considerably harder as were those of enslaved people living in cabins on plantations in southern slave states. Published a few years before Walden, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin described immorality of America’s peculiar institution and helped advance the abolitionist cause.
The increased mobility offered by the automobile and America’s postwar prosperity lead to the rise of the vacation cabin as a “second home” increasingly within the reach of the American middle class. Even as it became more associated with family recreation, the secluded cabin was still a place to retreat from society. And so while it could be where one could go to fish with the kids and build campfires, it was also a place where one could write manifestos and build pipe bombs.
Both Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski were highly-educated Harvard graduates who built cabins in the woods to retreat from society. But beyond those superficial similarities there are important distinctions as well. When Thoreau relocated to the woods around Walden Pond, his isolation was not complete. He viewed his time there as a temporary experiment: a way to better understand himself and his place in society while still maintaining regular connections to society. Kaczynski’s retreat to rural Montana was arguably more pathological and intended to be permanent. When the freedom of that isolation was challenged by an influx of development to the area (an unincorporated community ironically named “Lincoln”), he turned to terrorism in a crusade to undermine the society he so adamantly sought to leave behind.
The ideas of Thoreau’s Walden are certainly more mainstream than those of Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future (the so-called “Unabomber Manifesto”), but both share a suspicion of modernity and the harm it causes to both humans and the environment alike. But while Kaczynski sought to violently tear down the existing sociopolitical order, Thoreau recognized that his experience during his cabin in the woods was ultimately an individual one. He argues not to forcibly remake society to his liking, but for each member of that society to forge their own individual path through the modern world.
It is ultimately this individualism - this freedom to choose - that lies at the core of American identity. And perhaps the best place to express that freedom (both for better and for worse) is in a small cabin in the woods.
