The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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January 5, 2007

Authentic cabin more than the sum of its parts

Three smaller buildings provide lumber for single structure

By Dan Linehan

MANKATO — A crane jolts noisily to life overhead while electric drills drive metal spikes into planks of wood.

But listen closer and you may hear an ax chopping, or maybe an oversized mallet banging away. This isn’t because these traditional tools are any better. They’re not.

This may sound at first like a modern construction site, but — and this part is important — this building will look nothing like anything built during the last 100 years.

That means there will be no thin, precise cuts that are the telltale marks of modern equipment. So that ax you may have heard wasn’t chosen for its chopping properties, but because its crude, wood-splintering incision can mask modern cuts.

If there is one word to describe this log cabin, it has to be “authentic.”

The entire exterior won’t bear the clean hole of a power drill or feature a surface smoothed by a planer.

When an Idaho resort was looking for a company to find old lumber and build an authentic cabin, it turned to Terrasol Restoration and Renovation, a St. Peter company.

And this is Terrasol’s specialty, but it has never built a cabin this large. Its second-biggest effort was barely a third this size.

This 28-by-52-foot structure required that three smaller cabins (one each from New Germany, Beauford and Osseo, Wis.) be disassembled to provide the 44,000 pounds of wood necessary. The cabins were built between 1870 and 1890.

But another problem quickly comes to mind: How, exactly, does one transport a large building 1,110 miles?

It will leave Mankato on Saturday as individual pieces of lumber, traveling on two flatbed semis. Each piece of wood bears a simple notation that will tell the crew in Idaho where it goes.

The entire schematic, of course, is anything but simple.

“I’m the puzzle maker,” says Jared Groebner, a project manager with Terrasol. He estimates he’s spent 300 hours on drawings that detail how the cabin should be assembled.

On Thursday afternoon, a crew of about a dozen was busily thrusting lumber into place, drilling holes and working on other tasks indecipherable to a reporter. Work was planned to continue until midnight and continue in the morning if necessary to meet the deadline.

“Nothing like pressure,” Groebner said.

These exacting standards are coming from the developers of the Gozzer Ranch in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho.

Dewayne Shults is a project architect with Montana-based Fullerton Architects. He said it was difficult to find a company that could supply the aged lumber and build the cabin.

“Everything should be weathered naturally,” Shults said. “There should not be any evidence of (modern) cuts.”

And it’s easy to tell — at least for someone who knows what to look for — the difference between an old piece of lumber and the virgin wood beneath. That’s because if you cut away just a few inches, you’re cutting away the evidence of 100 frigid winters and 100 humid summers.

The cabin’s final destination may have shocked — or perhaps just amused — the men and women who built these log cabins on the frontier.

It will be a pro shop in a golf course. There will be an even larger clubhouse as well as other, smaller structures on the green.

The romantic, rustic image of Montana may conjure up images of log cabins galore, and Shults says they’ve managed to find some.

“But our resources seem to be running out.”

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