Owners discover home is 19th-century log cabin

Columbus Dispatch

DUBLIN, Ohio

Home renovations can yield surprises.

But few are as big as the one that Kevin Kemp and Jennifer Alexander discovered.

The couple was planning to raze a home that they bought recently on Riverside Drive in Dublin to build a new house on the property, when Kemp and a friend, Larry Daniels, decided to remove some paneling for reuse.

“We pulled off one of the pieces of paneling and I said, ‘Larry, that’s a log,’” Kemp recalled. “We pulled off another and I said, ‘My god, this is a log cabin.’”

Behind the knotty-pine paneling and drywall were walnut and beech logs, some more than 16 inches wide and 30 feet long. More deconstruction revealed the prize: a perfectly preserved two-story log cabin, probably built between 1820 and 1840.

Experts say it’s one of the largest and best-preserved log cabins discovered in central Ohio.

The remarkable find prompted Kemp and Alexander to halt their planned demolition and contact the city of Dublin.

“I think history is really important,” said Kemp, a chiropractor who now lives in Gahanna. “This doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the city.”

Dublin saw an opportunity to preserve a piece of its past.

“I was just amazed when I walked in and saw the cabin,” Assistant City Manager Michelle Crandall said. “I knew when I walked in we had to find a way to salvage it.”

The city hired the Columbus company Structural Erectors to dismantle the cabin, at a cost of about $27,000, with the hope of rebuilding it elsewhere.