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Antione Moore with Z&L Wrecking carries a beam that broke in half while dismantling a discovered log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, which was part of a modern home along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer melted some of the vinyl siding off the house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Antione Moore with Z&L Wrecking carries a beam while dismantling a discovered log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, which was part of a modern home along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off the house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Antione Moore with Z&L Wrecking carries a beam that broke in half while dismantling a discovered log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, which was part of a modern home along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off the house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Ryan Little with Z&L Wrecking operates an excavator to demolish the roof and back-end addition of a modern home to allow the original log cabin structure to remain on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off this house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
St. Louis County Cultural Site Manager Jesse Francis helps stack the removed beams during the dismantling of a log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, discovered as part of a modern home along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
The logs have simple “V” notched joints as photographed on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, at a log cabin discovered along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Ryan Little with Z&L Wrecking operates an excavator to demolish the roof and back-end addition of a modern home to allow the original log cabin structure to remain on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off this house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Antione Moore with Z&L Wrecking rips the modern siding off the front side of a house to reveal the structure of an original log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, in the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer melted some of the vinyl siding off the house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Nini Harris and Brian Kolde are researching houses in Carondelet, which they say may date to the 1820s or as early as the late 1700s. An exhibit at the Carondelet Historical Society explores their findings, and they’ve studied rooflines and support beams in some private homes now covered by tar paper and siding. Carondelet, which was once its own town just south of St. Louis, was founded in 1767 by Frenchman Clement Delor de Treget.
These homes in this photo, in the 200 block of Nagel Avenue in Carondelet may be early French construction.
Other stone buildings in Carondelet date to the 1840s.
ST. LOUIS — In late July, a fire burned down a house in the city’s Carondelet neighborhood, melting away the siding on a house next door.
The damage revealed a secret the house had been harboring for decades: It was a log cabin.
On Tuesday, the nonprofit Landmarks Association of St. Louis had the log cabin dismantled and plans to eventually have it reassembled in Carondelet Park. The home stood at 7616 Vermont Avenue.
It is a rare discovery on a brick-bungalow-filled city street. The cabin will help tell the story of Carondelet, which was founded in 1767 and was an independent city until St. Louis absorbed it about 100 years later.
Robert McLaughlin, owner of the two-bedroom, one-bath home, had tenants living there at the time of the fire and had no idea it was a log cabin. It had a rear addition and was otherwise modernized.
“We rehabbed it. I was always curious why this room was completely out of square and the walls were enormous,” he said. “And now we know.”
Ryan Little with Z&L Wrecking operates an excavator to demolish the roof and back-end addition of a modern home to allow the original log cabin structure to remain on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off this house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
It was also difficult to screw anything into the walls because the wood was so dense, he noted.
McLaughlin, who owns other rental properties in the area, was “more than happy” to donate the home and the land to the Landmarks Association. “I wanted it saved. I don’t want it to end up in a landfill,” he said.
Andrew Weil, executive director of the Landmarks Association, said it’s never ideal to move a house from its original location, but the home couldn’t be saved here.
Some of the logs have fire and termite damage, but experts will assess each piece, restore and rebuild what’s too damaged to save, and likely take the money from the land sale and put it toward reconstruction.
A square nail juts out of beam on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, at a log cabin discovered along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
The association is working with the city and would like to make the cabin part of the complex around the historic Lyle House in Carondelet Park, which was likely built around the 1860s. Preservationists are raising money to restore Lyle House to be used as some type of gathering space.
“That’s a way to not just have it disappear, and it’s a way to keep it in Carondelet,” Weil said of the cabin.
The cabin is a simple structure, about 17-by-17 feet, with a doorway in front and a window on each side of the door, a window on one side, no windows on the other, and several openings at the back, which led to the addition.
“They’ve just been lifting these off,” said Weil of the logs. “They’re just held together with notches and gravity.”
Z&L Wrecking Co. brought machinery for the heavy lifting.
It’s difficult to tell when the house was built, though Jesse Francis, cultural site manager for St. Louis County Parks who came out to tag the logs and help with the disassembly, thinks it dates to the 1840s. He pointed out the lime and sand mortar, and said the sand likely came from the Mississippi River and the lime made nearby.
The wood is poplar, cottonwood, white oak and red oak, most no larger around than a salad plate, likely harvested from the woods nearby. Some of the logs showed several layers of whitewash, and some logs had round holes where pegs held pieces together.
Weil knows that the land where it sits was once part of the Carondelet Commons, land set aside for public use. That land was used for things like grazing livestock and building materials, so it’s not likely that a home was built there until land was subdivided for private use in the first half of the 1800s, he said.
Weil’s research showed the town leased that block to a man named Peter Conrad for a period of 99 years, starting on May 6, 1847. He could farm the land for an annual rent of $3. Conrad or one of his tenant farmers could have built the cabin, though by this time nearby homes were being built of brick, stone and milled lumber, Weil said.
Weil studied the census and found two Peter Conrads living in the area at the time. In 1850, there’s a record of blacksmith Peter Conrad, 33, his wife, Eliza, 23, and their daughter Lorette, 2, who lived in St. Louis County. The couple were born in Pennsylvania, something Weil found interesting because “V” notches at the end of the logs, like the ones on the Carondelet cabin, can be associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition.
The logs have simple “V” notched joints as photographed on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, at a log cabin discovered along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
That Conrad family disappeared from the Missouri census by 1860, but the daughter was recorded as being born in Missouri, which corresponds to the date of the lease.
The other Peter Conrad, born in 1817 in France, was listed in the 1850 and 1860 census as living in St. Louis city, first as a boatman and then a steamboat captain. He had a large family born in Missouri. Weil doesn’t think those Conrads farmed the property nor built the cabin, but they might have bought the lease and then sub-leased it to farmers.
This likely isn’t the only log cabin hiding under tar paper and siding in Carondelet. Some homes could date to the late 1700s, and historians have identified at least a dozen houses that feature traits of French buildings: stone first floors, gallery porches and rooflines with two pitches.
In 2017, the Carondelet Historical Society hosted an exhibit that showed off photos, logs and building pegs from dozens of buildings, some destroyed in recent years. Many of the homes, like the one disassembled Tuesday, had more modern additions, so the original log cabin simply became a single room of a larger house.
“It’s amazing that this held together, but it did,” said Francis. “We don’t know how many of them are left in St. Louis city.”
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Valerie Schremp Hahn is a features writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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The house, built by Alexander Lacy Lyle likely before the Civil War, could be used as an event space, restaurant or store, fundraisers say.
Nini Harris and Brian Kolde believe dozens of early French houses, dating from the late 1700s, still stand in the south St. Louis neighborhood.
The Dorseys, parents of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, bought the house Marcia Dorsey's grandparents once owned.
Residents in the neighborhoods around Carondelet Park could decide in August to tax themselves in order to fund maintenance and security across a swath of south city, including the park itself.
Antione Moore with Z&L Wrecking carries a beam that broke in half while dismantling a discovered log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, which was part of a modern home along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer melted some of the vinyl siding off the house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Antione Moore with Z&L Wrecking carries a beam while dismantling a discovered log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, which was part of a modern home along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off the house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Antione Moore with Z&L Wrecking carries a beam that broke in half while dismantling a discovered log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, which was part of a modern home along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off the house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Ryan Little with Z&L Wrecking operates an excavator to demolish the roof and back-end addition of a modern home to allow the original log cabin structure to remain on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off this house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Ryan Little with Z&L Wrecking operates an excavator to demolish the roof and back-end addition of a modern home to allow the original log cabin structure to remain on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off this house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
St. Louis County Cultural Site Manager Jesse Francis helps stack the removed beams during the dismantling of a log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, discovered as part of a modern home along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
The logs have simple “V” notched joints as photographed on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, at a log cabin discovered along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Ryan Little with Z&L Wrecking operates an excavator to demolish the roof and back-end addition of a modern home to allow the original log cabin structure to remain on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of rebuilding and relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer, melted some of the vinyl siding off this house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the log cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
The logs have simple “V” notched joints as photographed on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, at a log cabin discovered along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Antione Moore with Z&L Wrecking rips the modern siding off the front side of a house to reveal the structure of an original log cabin on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, in the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. The Landmarks Association had a crew dismantle the log cabin in hopes of relocating the cabin to Carondelet Park in the future. A fire at the house next door over the summer melted some of the vinyl siding off the house, revealing the logs underneath, which lead to the discovery of the cabin. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
A square nail juts out of beam on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, at a log cabin discovered along the 7600 block of Vermont Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood. Photos by Laurie Skrivan, lskrivan@post-dispatch.com
Nini Harris and Brian Kolde are researching houses in Carondelet, which they say may date to the 1820s or as early as the late 1700s. An exhibit at the Carondelet Historical Society explores their findings, and they’ve studied rooflines and support beams in some private homes now covered by tar paper and siding. Carondelet, which was once its own town just south of St. Louis, was founded in 1767 by Frenchman Clement Delor de Treget.
These homes in this photo, in the 200 block of Nagel Avenue in Carondelet may be early French construction.
Other stone buildings in Carondelet date to the 1840s.
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