Early log house brought lovingly back to life
Structure next to Bryn Mawr Hospital dates to 1704
LOWER MERION » After Roland Cadle helped Jude Plum restore the three-century-old log house next to Bryn Mawr Hospital, Cadle imagined that the ghosts of the first owners might now recognize it as their home.
“Mrs. Thomas would come back and look around and say that property looks really good,” said Cadle.
Plum, who grew up in the house next door on Mondella Avenue, said that an earlier owner, Horace Cornog, “always fascinated me.”
“He was an old hermit,” said Plum. “He lived here. In 1956, my mother found him. He was cutting a tree down and he had a heart attack and died. She put a blanket over him and called the police.” “It was fun living next to a hermit,” he said about growing up in Bryn Mawr. “It was a lovely neighborhood.”
Plum, who owns the Jude Plum Salon in Bryn Mawr, tried to buy the house about 20 years ago but Anne Elder, who lived there after Cornog, told him, “‘Over my dead body,’” he said. In a bit of irony, Plum bought the tiny house four years ago from a bank after Elder’s death, bidding against someone who wanted to raze it and build two townhouses.
“I was lucky I was able to get it,” said Plum. To see it turned into townhouses “would have been very sad.”
“When I started taking it apart, I found it had five layers, one top of another,” said Plum. The earliest layer was the log house built in 1704.
“During the Revolution the north and south sides starting deteriorating,” he said. “And they encapsulated the whole building, even the chimney, with wide boards and that really preserved it. Then they had stucco and all different layers of soft material on top. Everything was intact. The original, 28-inch wide oak flooring was under three layers of wood flooring. It was pretty amazing.”
“When I took the staircase down I saw the shadow of the original staircase,”
said Plum.
Plum credited Cadle’s expertise in helping him restore the log house.
Cadle, who owns Village Restorations & Consulting, Inc. in Hollidaysburg near Altoona, has been restoring log cabins for 46 years. He also restores other early stone and log buildings for state, federal and local governments and individuals.
“You name it, we’ve done it,” Cadle said. Cadle is currently working on a restoration of Logan Station, one of the first settlements in Kentucky.
Another company had begun to work on Plum’s cabin and did some “good things but some really bad things,” said Cadle. He told Plum, “Basically, what needs to be done is the roof needs to be jacked up and it needs to be taken apart log by log,” said Cadle. “You need to restore it as it was. He said, ‘That’s what I want.’”
“It was historically a significant house so we took on the project,” said Cadle. “We had actually bought another log house in central Pennsylvania made from white oak.”
While the other house had been built in the 1790s, nearly 100 years later, it was also covered up after 50 years use so the weathering on the logs was similar and it could be used in the restoration of Plum’s house.
“It was a good match,” said Cadle. “The goal was to end up with a house that the original owners could show up and say, “‘There’s been a lot of things happen around here but that’s my house.’”
Meanwhile, Plum traveled to Kennebunkport, Maine and visited a salvage company while he was there.
“I’d gone through the place and found nothing,” said Plum. “When I went out the back door they had brought in this load of wood, rafter boards from this early home in Kennebunkport. I had the owner drive me to the location he was doing salvage on this house and barn and I ended up buying all of the interior.” He had it trucked to Bryn Mawr.
“That’s how I was able to restore it as well as I did,” said Plum.
After some earlier publicity about his log house, Plum received a letter from a 90-year-old Newtown Square man who had traced his own family back 700 years to Sweden. A map that that man owns showed Bryn Mawr in the 1700s with the log home at that site belonging to the Rees Thomas family. The Thomas family hailed from Wales arriving on the Morning Star, a ship that arrived in 1683, the second ship carrying Welsh Quakers to the Philadelphia area.
“Rees Thomas’s son and grandson built that house,” said Plum.
“It’s a wonderful piece of history. I’m going to do a book on it. That’s my next little quest, since we’re now a Heritage City here in the United States.” Philadelphia was designated a World Heritage City in 2015.
“Over the front door in the mortar, when we took the chinking out, we found a woman’s shoe buckle,” said Plum. In colonial times people would hang shoes over the front door for good luck. And in the fireplace he found a tombstone with initials in it. “Who knows how that got there?” he said.
The log house sports two fire places that are connected to one chimney in a design called a turkey breast, he said. One side of the fireplace was used for cooking and the other was for the parlor, where Plum hung a 1920 musket.
“I’m sure they had very cozy winter nights with 6 children and two adults in 1,000 square feet,” he said.
In doing historical research on the property, Plum discovered references to a newspaper article in Main Line Life from 1877 when there was a complaint about a dispute at the log house, then on Haverford Avenue (now County Line Road).
“The constable came on horseback from Ardmore,” said Plum. He deputized another man along the way and a second constable from Radnor also came, the article said. “They banged on the door and David Mundell, who lived here, refused to open the door and they knocked it down.” Mundell attacked the constables and the deputy with “a corn sickle” and they “shot him dead,” Plum said. “Mundell’s wife was outraged and they were charged with murder and convicted. But the people of Lower Merion Township liked the constable so much that he was set free and justice prevailed.”
Inside the small log house, Plum has placed well-chosen antique furniture, including an American pewter cupboard, a grandfather clock, a 1780 tiger-eye maple rope bed and matching secretary. The winding staircase came from an early log house in upstate Pennsylvania, he said.
He added a kitchen in a rear addition which blends with the log house, although it has modern accoutrements. The kitchen floor is made from old bricks from Maine that were used as ship ballast. His powder room and upstairs bathroom are also modern, and include a bidet. Throughout the house Plum’s eclectic collection of weathervanes are on display, along with old portraits of Quakers, and a modern painting of Plum, who was an equestrian, along with his horse.
“It’s great,” Plum said. “I like collecting Americana.”
Another modern touch is the skylights that add light to the upstairs bedroom and dressing area. However, the windows are clad in wavy, early American glass. Modern insulation and heating were also added, he said. A full basement allows the heater and modern plumbing to remain hidden. The roof is made from hand cut, cedar shake shingles.
“Less was more in trying to preserve what I had,” he said.
Outside the house, Plum designed a colorful garden replete with flowers that bloom spring through fall, including fragrant lavender, four types of clematis and yellow roses. There is also a soothing, musical fountain in a koi pond. His small yard is behind a brick wall built in the English design of the colonial area, with gates made from period wood brought from Maine. The mortar is the front brick walkway and wall is of a grapevine design used in early America, he said. The walkway bricks are laid in a herringbone design favored by Thomas Jefferson, Plum said.
At the front door there is a three ring iron hitching post and a granite stoop, as well as period shutters that also came from Maine.
Cadle said he tried to restore the house, as much as possible, to its original 1704 state.
“The windows on the second floor and gables were added probably at the time of the Revolutionary War,” he said. “Even the windows on first floor are expensive items. There as one piece of one original window left.”
Although the first floor had been divided into two rooms, a kitchen area and a more formal living room, Plum and Cadle decided to open the area up with just a hint of where the dividing wall had been.
“Something like that you want to do it tastefully, keeping the historical integrity and doing modern conveniences,” Cadle said about the kitchen addition.
While the log house now “sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb,” Cadle said, “I think it’s not an addition to the community. The community is an addition to the log house.” He noted that Rees Thomas had received a 1,800-acre land grant from William Penn. It’s now “almost the expensive land” in the country. Cadle “replaced half the original rafters,” he said. The replacements are “handmade and dovetailed like the originals are. Our goal was to do a restoration as honest to the original as could be done.”
Plum was impressed that Cadle used modern tools then finish off with ancient tools.
Cadle also approves the formal English brick wall and garden that Plum added.
“I like the fact that he did a period formal brick wall,” Cadle said. “It’s not an English garden, but it is, in a period manner.”
Gerald Francis, president of the Lower Merion Historical Society, said Plum had come to the society early on to try and find out information about the property, but not much was recorded in the early 1700s.
“We worked with him as he tried to take the skin off the house,” said Francis. “It’s kind of noticeable,” said Francis. “You can’t miss it next to Bryn Mawr Hospital.”
It is one of the earliest structures in the township, he said, although the Swedes and Dutch had built log cabins in the forest before the Quakers came.
“It was wilderness,” said Francis. “You went out to the woods and built your house.”
“What makes this special is, it’s a completely intact log house,” said Francis. “They started with a log house.”
“The property is not listed on the historic inventory,” said Francis. “They never knew there was a log house here. The township would like to put it on the township’s historic inventory and will be approaching Jude this fall.”
Francis added, “It’s his property, his money. He restored it the way he wanted. He’s a very creative, artistic-type person. It’s an old building but he’s modernized it inside.”
There is another log cabin in Gladwyne that dates from the early 1700s on private property on Maple Hill Road but that cabin is not visible from the street and is in a state of disrepair and likely to completely decay in the next few years, said Francis.
Plum’s house is “one of the earliest” remaining log structures in Lower Merion.
“The property is not listed on the historic inventory,” said Francis. “They never knew there was a log house here. The township would like to put it on Lower Merion’s historic inventory and will be approaching Jude this fall.”
Francis added, “It’s his property, his money. He restored it the way he wanted. He’s a very creative, artistic type person. It’s an old building but he’s modernized it inside.”
As for Plum, he termed log house property, “Amazing.”
“Once you enter the gate, you step back in time,” Plum said. “Originally a farm, it’s now urban.”