Joe Herrle, left, and Jeremy Hess, of Logs and Timbers, LLC, remove a long log from a work bench on the south side of the Historic Jackson House in this April 2017 file photo.
More than 100 years after the newly rebuilt Jackson House was purchased by Washington State Parks, the agency has embarked on a project to give the log cabin a facelift.
“It’s a link to our territorial history,” said Alex McMurry, historic preservation planner for Washington State Parks. “It’s really just state heritage we’re preserving.”
The project is budgeted at $150,000 and is expected to be completed in June.
McMurry was at the site along Jackson Highway north of Toledo Wednesday talking with carpenters from Logs & Timbers LLC, a contractor that specializes in restoring log buildings, about new problems they’d discovered in the house.
“This is a log-repair project, primarily,” he said. “We’re still adjusting the scope of the log repairs to the conditions we’re finding.”
The logs are in various states of disrepair. They also need new chinking to make the building more resistant against air and water.
The project includes rehabilitating the cabin’s windows replacing the porch, roof and outer porch columns and resolving issues with water pooling behind the chimney.
“We’re replacing things in kind generally,” McMurry said. “We are making a couple changes to make the building last longer.”
The logs were last chinked with cement. They’ll now be chinked with a modern foam material. Originally, they would have been touched up each year with mud and natural materials.
“They were building with what they had, which wasn’t much,” he said.
Workers from Logs & Timbers are using hand tools available during the time period the cabin was built to replace damaged logs, all solid Douglas-fir.
The cabin will get a new finish to repel water and the building will get a gutter system.
The project will also add new interpretative panels and a new wooden fence around the property. A concurrent project will add a pathway connecting portions of the State Parks property.
John R. Jackson built his first cabin on the property that now sits along Jackson Highway in 1845. He married his wife Matilda, who already had four boys, a few years later, and in 1850 built a larger cabin, which became the historic meeting place and courthouse known as the Jackson House.
The building that currently bears the name of the Jackson House Historic Site is actually a 1915 reconstruction of Jackson’s 1850 cabin.
After John Jackson’s death, Matilda moved off the property in 1882, McMurry said. The cabin was abandoned and fell into a state of disrepair.
Seeing the dilapidation of the building, used as a home as well as a courthouse and county seat, the St. Helens Club of Chehalis, a women’s organization, decided to tear down and rebuild the structure.
“It’s not completely accurate in terms of representing what Jackson built … but it’s an important building for its association with Jackson and an early women’s association,” McMurry said.
The 1915 building was not all brand new, he said.
“There are pieces of Jackson’s 1850 house that are in this building,” McMurry said. “The stairway is original.”
The 1850 building was taller and had a different slope to its roof, he said.
The house has been the subject of continuing preservation work since 1915, McMurry said.
The house is part of the second state park acquired by the state of Washington, McMurry said.
In 1922, the Washington State Historical Society added a stone wall and archway in front of the house. The archway is no longer there, but part of the current restoration project is to replace it, McMurry said.
In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps worked on the property.
The house was formally added to the National Register of Historic Places in January.
