Log Cabin is a link to mid-1600s Swedish trading settlements along Delaware Bay

What do four 1,000-year-old Indian paths, seventeenth-century Swedish traders in Delaware, eighteenth-century architecture on the Eastern Shore and nineteenth-century German immigrants to Caroline all have in common? The log cabin built on “Painter’s Range” near Preston!

The history of Caroline County is filled with intriguing linkages between our “remote” area and the outside world. The log cabin relocated from Payne Road to our Museum is an excellent example.

First of all, it is an indirect product of the Indian paths that once traversed Caroline and linked the region in the mid 1600s with Swedish trading settlements along the coast of Delaware Bay. Most architectural historians agree that the technique of constructing log cabins with notched corners came to America via these Swedish traders.

Log construction moved inland along Indian paths that were later converted to roadways by settlers. For instance, Maryland Route 16 which passes north within one-half mile of “Painter’s Range” and ultimately heads east to Lewes, Delaware is a former Indian path.

Not surprisingly, log cabin construction on the lower Shore was rare because the area was not as directly linked by Indian paths to the Delaware settlements. On the other hand, 26 of 53 structures in Denton were constructed of logs in 1807.

From the standpoint of architectural form, the dwelling on “Painter’s Range” is an excellent example of a hall plan or one-room house. Hall dwellings were erected with logs, or brick or wood framing. The single room or “hall” was the site of all day-to-day functions: cooking, eating, craftwork, sleeping, as well as birth and death.

Hall dwellings were so common at the end of the 18th century that they housed roughly 85% of the inhabitants of southern Delawareand the lower Shore. While these small one-room houses constructed of brick, frame or logs were the most common house form in the 1700s, they became less popular by the mid 1800s. By the time the log dwelling was built on Painter’s Range about 1828, one-room houses in rural areas were associated with “subsistence farmers”; i.e., a family scratching out a living on fifteen to thirty acres.

In its final tenure as a dwelling in 1892, the log cabin on “Painter’s Range” became the refuge of the William Rieck family, German immigrants fleeing European political turmoil and economic depression at the end of the 19th century.

The Riecks eventually erected a dwelling nearby and the cabin became a granary. Nonetheless, the cabin contains virtually all of its original white oak logs and slab chinking as well as its original mantle, stairway, and batten doors.

The family of Mr. Robert Rieck, present-day descendants, donated the cabin to the Museum, where it serves as a reminder of its many intricate linkages with past centuries.

16 N. Second St., Denton, Maryland

Open Saturdays 10 am to 3 pm

April 1 thru November 30