Log homes a lifestyle for master builder
Stuart Morrison was 12 years old when he met Pat Wolfe, a wire of a man with a white beard and a certain mystique about him. Wolfe lived off the grid in a home he built with his own hands on a 100-acre property near Middleville, Ont., a village about an hour west of Ottawa. He ate what he grew in his garden, relied upon solar and wind energy to keep the lights on, and drove a horse and buggy in his spare time, just for kicks.
“Pat was a real spirit of the woods,” Morrison said. “He is not as big as Paul Bunyan, but, despite his size, I’d say he is a giant.”
Some would say he is a legend. He’s famous, in a niche kind of way, among former students in Japan, Australia, Europe, North America and points in between, who have made the trek to The Pat Wolfe Log Building School in Lanark County.
Wolfe has taught ex-RCMP commissioners looking to get their hands dirty, and ex-convicts looking for a fresh start. He has taught jaded Danish carpenters, pining to work with Canadian pine, husbands and wives, husbands and mistresses, and grandfathers and grandsons. Some students are skilled, others have never picked up a chainsaw, an essential tool among log builders.
Wolfe founded the school in 1975 — Morrison and his father, Brian, own and operate it now — but its namesake, with a pair of beat-up hips, shoulders that ache and a birth certificate that puts his age at 77, still makes a cameo or two when courses are in session, often arriving on horseback.
Wolfe also regularly fields long-distance calls from people looking to ask him questions about his craft, chief among them: Is a log home warm? Answer: generally yes, and the bigger the log, the better the insulation.
“It is the heritage, the romanticism of the log home that draws people to it in the first place, I think,” Wolfe said.
Statistics are hard to come by, but log home builders are “busier than ever,” according to Jennifer Saunders of the International Log Builders Association (ILBA), an organization founded in 1974 and headquartered in Orillia, Ont.
That activity could be a reflection of a push to go green, or perhaps the desire among urbanites to escape the city and COVID-19. Or, as Wolfe points out, it could be that people are attracted by the history of it, or the kooky idea that, in an age when so many earn a living while sitting at a desk, we’re actually capable of making stuff with our own hands.
“Pat is held in such high regard internationally because of what a Canadian log home building represents,” said Robert (Log Bob) Savignac, a Wolfe contemporary and past ILBA president.
Fitting logs together, and not willy-nilly but good and snug, is both a science and an art form. It just so happens the Canadian rendering of said art has cachet worldwide.
Savignac, like Wolfe, has taught courses internationally, including in the jungles of Indonesia. He has built and shipped a Canadian-style log home to a Canadian living in the Middle East.
Russian builders often speak of building in the Canadian style, according to Savignac. Sweden, a country with a healthy appreciation for wood and design, is home to a region that actively touts its log homes as being built the Canadian way.
Under-scribing, shrink-tofit, saddle notches, such is the lingo of the logs; techniques honed over generations in the great north woods that may be invisible to the layperson’s eye, but are renowned among those wielding chainsaws.
“When something is done well, you can’t necessarily tell, but when something is done badly, it glares out,” Savignac said.
Way back when, in warmer climates, stone structures sufficed. But in mid-February in the middle of nowhere, circa 1800 in what is now Canada, log homes offered better insulation, and the materials to build them were readily at hand.
Fur traders needed shelter, and so it was that log frame buildings spread from east to west. United Empire Loyalists, fleeing the American Revolution, introduced Pennsylvania-style log homes to Southern Ontario, structures that reflected the building techniques of 17th century Swedes and Finns who settled in the Delaware River region, south of the border.
Alas, for log lovers, as the decades passed and Canadian cities bloomed, log homes came to be regarded as relics. Nobody wanted to play at being a pioneer unless they were actually pioneers.
The handicraft drifted to the margins, only to be rediscovered in the 1970s by hippies and back-to-the-land types.
Mind you, Bernard Allan Mackie was no hippie. He was an aspiring cowboy who in 1971 founded the first log building school — anywhere — in Prince George, B.C. He was all about self-sufficiency: if a person can build their own home, why wouldn’t they?
Mackie and his ex-wife, Mary, are both now deceased, but in 1971 they self-published Building with Logs, a how-to-bible on the subject that went on to become an unlikely international bestseller. The book is still in print nine editions later.
“It is the heritage, the romanticism of the log home that draws people to it in the first place, I think.”
Pat Wolfe