House on a Hill: Connecting with the Past in Western Pennsylvania

“It is our family and local histories that are our most precious parts of culture, in my estimation. They put ‘meat on the bones’ of the artifacts we find. Of course, all family history is myth until we have the documentation that backs it up.”
— Lynne Humphries-Russ

First view of the Carroll Cabin upon rounding a bend in the road.
Photo, Katherine Peresolak

The narrow access road was hidden, and I almost missed the turnoff. I was anxious to see the abandoned house that I was told might be 100 years old. Despite the bare late-winter trees, the house was still hidden from my view at the base of the access road. I passed through the gate and followed the winding gravel trail as it ascended the mountain and took a sharp right. There was the house. It loomed on the higher ground before me, larger and taller than I had imagined. The windows were boarded shut and some of the squared logs had partially rotted away, allowing me to see straight through it from one corner. Despite the decay, I wondered at this old yet abiding building, and I was curious about its history and occupants.

For me and many others, it is a personal connection to the past that sparks interest in and support for preservation. This is what drew me to research the historic Carroll Cabin and its farmstead in Fayette County for my master’s thesis at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. My research led to the discovery that the cabin is among the oldest extant hand-hewn log homes in southwestern Pennsylvania. My thesis, “Advocating for the Carroll Cabin: Archaeological Investigations at a Historic Home,” completed in cooperation with the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation & Natural Resources (DCNR), led to a Preservation Planning Award from Preservation Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission (PHMC) in 2017.

Map of Pennsylvania State Forest Districts, showing the location of Carroll Cabin in Forbes State Forest in the Forbes District.
Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

The Carroll Cabin is an enduring house on a hill, a surviving emblem of western Pennsylvania’s history and growth. Named after the Carroll family who owned the house and surrounding farm property for more than a century, it is a log structure with a northern plank frame addition that is located on DCNR property in the Forbes State Forest.

I was invited to view the house and property after earlier conversations with Ranger Rogers Clawson. Clawson was a driving force in trying to get outside researchers to connect with historic properties at Forbes. He initially contacted the Anthropology Department at IUP at least a year earlier to invite student researchers to take an interest in state properties like the Carroll Cabin (known internally as the Morrow Jones Cabin, after a later owner), the DuPont Powder Mill, and an early 20th-century convent. Forbes State Forest employee Kirk Moore had established a collection of research for numerous buildings and resources present on Forbes property, but Ranger Clawson’s advocacy was necessary to continue expanding upon that foundation.

One of my favorite books in middle school was The House Next Door by Richie Tankersley Cusick. For me, the most memorable part read, “Clumps of ivy and drooping oaks overhung its chimneys and porches. Once-white Victorian walls had weathered to an ashen gray, and broken gingerbread trim hung from the eaves.” It described the tattered and forgotten state of a formerly grand house. Just so, it was the abandoned appearance of the Carroll Cabin that drew me in — its stature and residing strength. I couldn’t leave the research to someone else.

The eastern facade of the Carroll Cabin during 2016 fieldwork. Dead vegetation has since been cleared away.
Photo, Katherine Peresolak

Have you ever come across a stone foundation in the woods or an abandoned house along a rural roadside, the inhabitants long gone? Did you wonder who lived there and what stories the place held? One of the best and most valuable parts of this house’s story was that Carroll relatives were still alive and interested in the fate of the house. Carroll descendants who were willing to share their family history with me provided an amazing opportunity to hear first-hand accounts of life in the house from approximately 1950 until the property was donated to the Forbes State Forest by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 2008.

Morrow and Daniel Jones, the two brothers who donated the property to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, and their cousin Lynne Humphries-Russ are all descendants of William Asbury Carroll. Inda, Lynne’s greatgrandmother, was one of William and Caroline Masure Hager Carroll’s nine children and was most likely born in the cabin. The early history of both the property and the log home intrigued Lynne as much as me. Her personal connection to the land and house was obvious and visceral when we talked at the cabin in late October 2016. She told me, “I keep a photo of the cabin on my desk at all times to remind me of my roots. Thank you for the work you’re doing to color in some of the history of this land, the cabin, and the place where those roots were put down.”

The Jones brothers spent their early years in the Carroll Cabin after their parents, Alfred and Anna B. Carroll Jones, purchased the property from Carroll descendants in 1952 and began a renovation project that included adding indoor plumbing, replacing several rotten hewn beams from the log section, and adding a porch to its northern entrance. The Jones brothers told me that their earliest memories of the house, prerenovation, was of the newspapers covering the interior walls once used as insulation.

This view of the roof shows the burnt wood used in construction and a sapling rafter. Central beams were marked with matching Roman numerals.
Photo, Katherine Peresolak

The Jones family’s tenure as the occupants and owners of the house featured some fascinating and colorful episodes. Morrow and his wife, Susan, lived there as adults in the summer of 1965 while they worked at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. A year before that, a defrocked Catholic priest, Father Roman, rented the house and lived there with his girlfriend. His contribution was a quote in French: “Elle passe, la figure de ce monde” (“She passes, the figure of this world”), a reference to Corinthians 7:31 that he painted onto the walls of the log portion of the house, now preserved under at least one layer of paint or wallpaper. Coal miners rented the property in the 1970s and were the last regular occupants of the house, which was boarded up in the 1980s. A series of robberies and vandalism in that decade further jeopardized the future of the Carroll Cabin’s stability and preservation into the future.

Despite their deep family connection the house, property and region, the Jones brothers faced a harsh reality: Preserving historic buildings, whether occupied or not, is a challenge that requires a significant amount of funding and effort. Morrow noted, “Toward the end of his life, dad got increasingly anxious about what to do with the farm; we inherited both the property and the anxiety. The only solution for us as absentee owners was to approach the state via, in this case, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the caretakers of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, where Susan and I worked that summer.”

Dan said, “When Morrow and I inherited the farm in 2000, we quickly found that keeping the property was a costly proposition. Morrow and I still have a strong sense of connection to that land and to Wharton Township, and I think we both regret at some level that our lives took us in different directions.”

Ultimately, the Jones brothers decided to donate the property and hoped that ownership by the commonwealth might provide some protection to the house. After the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy transferred the property to DCNR in 2008, the building was protected as public property but remained unattended.

When I became involved with efforts to study the house in 2016, I decided to focus my research on building a context by searching for the history of the house. I knew that one method alone would be insufficient to answer all my research questions, so I chose five methodologies that might build upon each other: documentary research, a study of the house’s materials and design, soil chemistry analysis, archaeological excavation around the house, and dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating.

Documentary research involved studying county courthouse deed records, websites, and published stories about the cabin, and these resulted in the chain of property noted on the table.

This table reflects the documentary research on the house that was compiled from county courthouse deed records, online information and published materials.

The house itself is constructed of handhewn log timbers with a double-sized chimney located in the northern wall. The larger hearth faces into the log home while the smaller hearth faces north into the plank frame addition. My architectural survey involved analyzing and documenting the characteristics of the house, its materials and layout; how the exposed ends of the hand-hewn logs appeared to fit together (or not); the variation in utilized nail types and how wood material was cut with different tools; and any noticeable changes to the house like the renovation by the Carrolls in the early 1950s. I noted instances of material reuse, water damage to the plank frame addition’s floor from deterioration against the chimney, and a slow-forming but problematic lean noticeable in the southern gable. Ultimately, the analysis indicated a late 18th-century or early 19th-century construction date.

The log home’s cellar reveals construction at the north foundation wall, with hand-hewn log joists holding the floor above. The stones on the wall are larger at left to support the fireplace above.
Photo, Katherine Peresolak

For the soil chemistry analysis, I collected seven soil samples from across the farmstead to test for differential land use. The basic agricultural soil test kit that I used as one approach to measure soil chemistry failed to provide significant results; however, X-ray fluorescence (XRF), which measures the emission of energy from samples bombarded with gamma radiation, did provide evidence for differential land use on the old farm property, whether from differences in plants or crops, differences in intensity of use, or other unidentified reasons.

The archaeological excavations involved three test units that revealed potential efforts to improve drainage at the foundation with the emplacement of artificial fill and some associated 19th- and 20th-century artifacts recovered. There was no evidence of a builder’s trench around the older part of the house, likely because of the removal of soil from the south and the stone foundation laid from inside that space instead of inside an excavated trench. The exposed stone foundation clearly showed the boundary between the original log house and the mid-19th-century addition.

The dendrochronology results were essential regarding the pre-1830s story of the house — the part of the story that the documentary research and architectural survey could not tell. With the help of DCNR, I extracted six samples from various locations within the exterior logs and two unhewn cellar logs. The delicate cylinder-shaped samples were then analyzed by Cornell University’s Tree-Ring Laboratory to try to match the tree rings in my samples to already dated tree-ring chronologies in Pennsylvania and surrounding states. From my documentary research, I knew that the earliest European landowner, Thomas Ramsey (1790), could have lived on the property before the construction of the Carroll Cabin; however, it is unlikely that such large logs and hand-hewn beams would have been moved from a great distance. My other methodologies pointed to an early 19th-century construction date, so imagine my excitement when Cornell’s report revealed that the house was probably built circa 1775, with a possible cellar replacement or southward expansion circa 1810.

In this test unit excavation along the western wall where the log home and the addition meet, a visible “seam” of the original foundation under the log home, right, is aside the abutting addition’s foundation, left.
Photo, Katherine Peresolak

The circa 1775 construction date, for at least most of the tested house beams, places the Carroll Cabin in Pennsylvania’s frontier era and establishes it as one of the oldest buildings still standing in western Pennsylvania. If the Carroll Cabin was built by 1775 and occupied until about 1980, then it was continuously occupied for approximately 205 years and has been standing now for 245 years.

In 2017, following the completion of my research, Joe Lauver of PHMC’s Division of Architecture and Preservation visited the cabin and helped DCNR create a stabilization plan to address the southern gable lean and water damage along the chimney. Prior to the design and placement of stabilizing poles and cables, an archaeological survey was required under state and federal law. In spring 2018 a crew comprised of volunteer professional archaeologists and undergraduate and graduate archaeology students completed a small survey to make sure the efforts to protect the building did not damage the archaeological deposits around it. In October 2018 DCNR’s Outdoor Corps completed the stabilization of the Carroll Cabin, a short-term but important step toward the long-term preservation and stability of the building.

DCNR is facing the same maintenance and preservation challenges that Morrow and Daniel Jones faced. As part of the agency’s mission, the Forbes State Forest manages gas extraction leases and timber sales in and around the old Carroll farm. This poses a risk to historic buildings, landscapes and archaeological sites and creates challenges for district staff that include resource identification, maintenance, preservation and funding for such efforts. Under state law, DCNR is required to address how these activities may impact historic properties.

The best research for preservation is impactful and contributes to positive change at any level. In my opinion, the next step at the Carroll Cabin is to secure support that could underwrite its assessment, rehabilitation and preservation. Great progress has been made at the Carroll Cabin, and it is a superb example of what is possible when cooperation and coordination between agencies, researchers and the public is successful. The completed research and the coordination that made it possible is just the beginning of this next chapter of the house’s life and what it represents. The Carroll Cabin is a physical reminder of not only the state’s and region’s history but also of family heritage and personal connections to where we come from and to what made us.

For more information on assisting with the preservation or restoration of Carroll Cabin, contact District Forester Ed Callahan of the Forbes State Forest at ecallahan@pa.gov.

Katherine Peresolak, RPA, began her archaeological career at age 15 as a volunteer with Chapter 21 of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology. In 2017 she received an M.A. in applied archaeology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.