200-year-old log house gets new life at Hanna's Town - TribLIVE

Log by giant log, painstakingly lifted by a crane and laid in place, the ends notched with a chainsaw to make them fit snugly, about a dozen craftsmen and volunteers are rebuilding a roughly 200-year-old log house that will fit right in with the other log houses at Historic Hanna’s Town, the restored village of the county seat in the 1770s.

“This is going to help us restore the image of an 18th-century village. We’re looking more like the original Hanna’s Town,” said Lisa Hays, executive director of the Westmoreland County Historical Society.

It will join about five other log houses at the site, which help visitors get the feel of a late-18th-century village that was the first English court west of the Alleghenies, before it was burned to the ground in a 1782 raid by Native Americans and their British allies.

Workers and historical society volunteers are building the 40-foot-by-16-foot log house, with a second story and a three-sided addition that will serve as a house for exhibiting period tools, said Hays, leader of the organization that operates the park.

The house will have a fireplace, wooden doors and seven windows, including one in the attic. The roof will be made of cedarshake.

“This would have been the home of a prominent family,” said Robert Reintgen of Derry, a retired history teacher and experienced log house restorer hired by the historical society to dismantle the house.

Hays is hoping the house that may have once been owned by a prominent family can be put in use sometime in late June.

The thick logs laying around the ground and what has formed four walls had stood along the Pleasant Valley Road in Hempfield just a week ago, Hays said.

It was owned by the estate of the late Thelma R. Lefevre Smith, who died in March 2019. The house had been on property owned by the Myers family in the 1700s.

To make the project possible, Hays said Lefevre’s family generously donated $100,000 not only to dismantle the structure but to transport it some seven miles and rebuild it at the 180-acre park, Hays said.

As logs were removed, they were carefully numbered with orange plastic tags and marked on a schematic design, where they had laid for about two centuries. That enabled Reintgen, working on his 53rd log house, and his crew to reuse the logs in the same way they fit in the original building.

Reintgen said they salvaged as much as they could from the original house.

The roof and floor boards were rotted and could not be saved, while some supports were so far gone “the building was literally floating kin the air,” Reintgen said. The old logs that were unusable have been replaced with new boards, where necessary.

“They (historical society) have the money to do this project right,” Reintgen said.

One of the mysteries of history that may never be determined is the exact age of the original building. Reintgen said the “heyday” for log houses in Westmoreland County was between 1780 and 1815, although this house could have been built earlier or later.

The historical society considers the structure dating to the late 18th century. Old deeds in the Westmoreland County Courthouse and available records emphasize a description of the property and not so much what might have been built upon it, Hays said.

Regardless of its exact age, “it’s a perfect example of all the log buildings in Hanna’s Town,” Reintgen said.

Joe Napsha is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Joe at 724-836-5252, jnapsha@triblive.com or via Twitter .

Categories: Local | Westmoreland