Quilts found at the site

December Crew

DECEMBER CREW

One wall remaining, one leg out of commission
(l. to r.) Myself, Mark Boyd, Paul Pippin, cousin Jared Hill, Chris Sherman, and Eddie


GET A LEG UP

In the entire six months I've been working on this project, it's amazing that no major injury has occurred.

Bu then we didn't have anybody as heroic as Mark Boyd on the job, who braved gravity to scale a tree in an attempt to lasso and raise a section of wall using the leverage a mighty tree limb might provide.

Gravity surpassed might, and down came Mark, but we chose to not let this be a damper to our spirits as you can see from this picture taken at our favorite Cookeville hangout: Spankie's.
In the end, what lesson did we learn from all this?

Why, simply that all work and no play make Lewis and Mark dull boys. And can very possibly cause leg injuries.

November Crew

Two-story chimney and fireplace that used to heat the main room of the log cabin,
minutes before it was lassoed and taken down by cousin Jared Hill and myself.


NOVEMBER CREW

We stayed cold and wet most of the time.
(l. to r.) Paul Pippin, Brandon Hines, Mark Boyd, Eric Harvey, myself, Chris Sherman, Paul D. Smith

July Crew

JULY CREW

Daily temps were in the 90s but here we are at the end of a day mostly happy.
(l. to r.) Myself, Reynaldo Rivera, Pascual Gomez, Pedro Santizo Alonzo, Bartolo Alonzo, Juan Lucas Gomez

June Crew

JUNE CREW

The very beginning of the entire disassembly: filthy, hard work in sweltering heat.
We were mostly exhausted, dehydrated and not particularly cheerful.
Myself, Brandon Hughes, Rick Scantland, Andy Certain, Steven Blank

May Crew

My old college pal Trey Williams and his wife Jodi came up to Cookeville all the way from Alabama.

Trey had homesteaded some family property in Alabama and built his own log cabin.
Having been involved with construction (and deconstruction) of other similar structures over the years, his advice and consultation with me was priceless.

He answered the various questions I had when setting out to do this project:
Could it be done - a deconstruction piece by piece, everything numbered for reassembly later?
Could he help me with this massive undertaking?

Was I crazy for trying to do this?
The answers: yes, yes, and maybe.

About Cookeville Cabin

This site is devoted to chronicling the renewed life of an old country log cabin and partial structure of a house which was built by my ancestors in the Northern end of Putnam County, Tennessee, in the Bangham community just north of Cookeville.

I have been disassembling the structure - numbering nearly every piece, inside and out - and storing the pieces of this large puzzle as I prepare to rebuild and restore it to its original form on another location in the next few months.

The cabin was last lived in by my great-uncle Lonnie Phillips in the late 1960s and was a favorite place of mine to visit as a child with my grandfather Jarvis Matheney, Sr. ("Pur") and my grandmother Susie Phillips Matheney ("Mur"), sister to Lonnie.

It sat on approximately 90 acres of beautiful woods and a former farm, had some electricity and no running water.

It's the only place I've ever been to that had a two-seater outhouse, or "privy" as they were often called.