St. Joe residents will have a new old cabin at Hayward
By Randy Hanson
In the spring of 1998, they disassembled a 140-year-old log cabin at Ellsworth and moved it to Bean Lake near Hayward, where it was reassembled. Now Scott is busy renovating it for use as their vacation home. The 16-by-25 log house was built in the 1850s. Five generations of the O'Neil family lived in it between 1872 and a few years ago when Jack O'Neil built a new house on the family farm. The Huntresses were looking into building a log cabin on their Bean Lake property when a co-worker at Harris Air in St. Paul told Scott about the O'Neil cabin. The co-worker is a member of the Ellsworth Fire Department, which was planning to burn the cabin. "I said, 'Wait a minute. Let's check it out.' That's how it all started," Scott told a writer for Trail Blazer Magazine. The Hayward publication ran a three-page story on the house-moving in its August edition. The log house didn't look like a cabin when the Huntresses first saw it. The exterior was covered with four layers of siding, while inside plaster and paint hid the logs. The roof was topped with cedar shakes and two layers of asphalt shingles. Scott called on friends and relatives to help him prepare the one-and-one-half story structure for disassembly. It took the group 150 hours to tear out the lath, doors, windows and plaster, according to the magazine article. "I tapped everyone I know to help on this," he is quoted as saying. "I think I burnt everyone out ." He added that he hopes his friends will come around again once the cabin is completed. Terrasol Renovation and Restoration of Kasota, Minn., took apart the logs, hauled them to Bean Lake, and put them back together again. The company specializes in rebuilding log structures. The logs were sandblasted and treated to resist bugs and rot, and a new roof was put on the cabin. Scott plans to start filling the space between the logs with an acrylic chinking material in early September. Windows, electrical wiring and a heating system also will be installed before the snow flies so Scott can do interior work during the winter. He is doing most of the work himself to save money. "He's gone every weekend," Ann said. The chinking material will cost about $15,000, Ann said. Still, the Huntresses expect to have a completed new, old cabin for around $60,000 - plus a lot of hard work. Ann says she didn't like the cabin when she first saw it. "I thought, oh, disgusting. It's 140 years old," she said. "Scott likes the old stuff and I'm the new person." After the logs were sandblasted and Scott put dormer windows in the loft, Ann started seeing the possibilities. Now she's planning on putting a claw foot tub in the bathroom. "It's going to be nice," she said. "We'll have a full cabin for what brand new logs, just the shell, cost." Scott is looking forward to spending weekends at the cabin with his family. The Huntresses have two young children together - a boy, Connar, who will soon be 2, and a 4-month-old girl, Tatum, who was baptized last month at St. Patrick's Catholic Church. Scott also has a 16-year-old son, Scott Jr., and 11-year-old daughter, Stephanie, from his first marriage. "We plan to come up every weekend when it's finished to snowmobile and ice fish," Scott is quoted as saying in the magazine article. "He'll go ice fishing and I'll have my girlfriends come up and we'll go snowmobiling to Angler Haven for a big burger," Ann said. "When it's all finished we're going to invite Jack O'Neil to come up for a week to vacation here and fish so he can appreciate the cabin's new home."
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