Axebites and Cabin Sills — The First Raising

The legal intent was penned on paper in Vienna, but on the frontier, a land title was meaningless until a man carved his presence into the timber itself. As the late summer heat of the 1840s began to give way to the crisp mornings of early autumn, the Comer men moved their teams off the high vantage of New Columbia Bluff and stepped onto the ground they had claimed in Grantsburg Township. Before a single seed could be planted or a single plowshare sunk into the dirt, they had to build.

The First Clearing

(An image of the Comer men using felling axes against a massive white oak goes here)

Orchestrating the Homestead

Establishing the initial settlement was a complex puzzle of resource management, physical limits, and raw geometry. John Epps, Moses, and Nathaniel could not simply build a shelter; they had to engineer a working homestead from scratch while keeping themselves and their livestock alive. Every step required careful calculation:

Siting the Hearth: The family had to choose a location that balanced safety and utility. They needed a slightly elevated, well-drained spot to keep the cabin floor dry during the torrential Southern Illinois rains, yet it had to be close enough to a running creek branch to make hauling water a manageable daily chore.

The Log Tally: To satisfy the legal requirement of a cabin at least fourteen feet square, the brothers had to identify, fell, trim, and haul roughly 20 to 30 straight-grained logs, each at least 16 to 18 feet long to allow for the corner notches.

Managing the Teams: The heavy lumber wagons were useless in the thick, unbroken undergrowth. Moses and Nathaniel had to use the horses to "skid" the massive logs—dragging the heavy timber across the forest floor using heavy iron chains hitched to the horse harnesses.

The Timeline: The clock was ticking fiercely. The brothers had to coordinate the clearing so that the logs could be cut, notched, and raised before the autumn rains turned the Grantsburg dirt into impassable mire and the first deep frost locked up the ground.

Tools and Supplies of the Trade

Aside from the square-cut iron nails, coarse salt, and fresh coffee they had just brought back from the Vienna mercantile, the construction relied entirely on the heavy edge-tools they had hauled from Tennessee:

The Felling Axe: A double-bitted or heavy single-bitted axe with a razor edge, used for hours on end to bite into the massive virgin oak and poplar.

The Broadaxe: A specialized, heavy axe with a flat face on one side, used by John Epps to "hew" the round logs into flat, squared timbers for the sills.

The Crosscut Saw: A two-man saw that required Moses and Nathaniel to work in perfect, rhythmic synchronization to buck the fallen trees to exact lengths.

The Frow and Beetle: A flat iron blade struck with a heavy wooden mallet, used to split straight-grained oak blocks into rough shingles (shakes) for the roof.

The Hand Auger: A T-shaped drilling tool used to bore large holes into the timbers for wooden pegs (trunnels), saving their precious iron nails for the roof rafters.

Breaking the Virgin Timber

The work was bone-deep and relentless. The silence of the old-growth Grantsburg timber was broken by the sharp, echoing thwack-thwack of steel meeting hardwood. Moses and Nathaniel took turns at the base of the massive white oaks, their muscles bunching as they swung the felling axes, clearing a wide perimeter around the cabin site to let the sunlight in and prevent falling limbs from crushing their future home.

While the young men felled and bucked the timber, seventy-year-old John Epps demonstrated the mastery of a lifetime of frontier building. Sitting on a stump with his handheld whetstone, he kept the steel sharp, then used the broadaxe to score and chip away the bark and sapwood of the foundation logs. He hewed the timber down until the round logs had flat, true faces, creating the "sill logs" that would rest directly on the earth or on flat foundation stones gathered from the creek beds.

Every log raised was a victory over gravity. Without a community of neighbors for a traditional cabin-raising, the three men had to rely on sheer leverage, block-and-tackle ropes, and the strength of their horses to roll the heavy logs up skids onto the growing walls. They used a simple, sturdy saddle-notch at the corners—a design John Epps had used back in Virginia and Tennessee—ensuring the timbers locked tightly together under their own immense weight.

Raising the Roof and Taming the Weather

Once the four main walls of notched white oak reached roughly eight feet high, the real test of frontier engineering began. Moses and Nathaniel used their horses and heavy hemp ropes to hoist the final, heaviest logs—the "plates"—to anchor the top of the structure. From there, they fashioned the rafters out of straight hickory saplings, using the hand auger to drill holes and secure them to the plates with wooden pegs.

The roof would be the family’s shield against the unpredictable Southern Illinois autumns, and it required a painstaking amount of hand-labor:

Riving the Shakes: While the brothers secured the frame, John Epps sat near the supply wagons with the frow and beetle. He took straight-grained blocks of red oak and meticulously split them into thin, flat shingles known as "shakes."

Securing the Shingles: Moses and Nathaniel laid the shakes in overlapping rows across the rafters. This was where their precious investment from the Vienna mercantile came into play; they used the square-cut iron nails sparingly but effectively to tack the shingles down, ensuring the roof would hold fast against driving rain and heavy winter snow.

Chinking, Daubing, and the Mud-Cat Chimney

A raised cabin was little more than a wooden cage until the wide gaps between the round logs were sealed against the biting winds and pests.

The brothers spent days "chinking" the walls—driving split wedges of leftover oak and poplar heartwood tightly into the spaces between the logs. Once the wooden chinks were firmly in place, they mixed a thick, sticky mortar of clay mud, water, and dried forest grass. Kneeling along the base of the cabin, they "daubed" the muddy mixture over the wood, smoothing it down to create an airtight, weatherproof seal.

The final and most crucial element of the structure was the hearth. Without access to a stone quarry or a brick kiln, the Comers built a traditional "mud-cat" chimney:

The Wood Cribbing: They built a small, interlocking four-sided pen out of split oak sticks, tapering it as it rose along the exterior gable end of the cabin.

The Mud Cats: They rolled handfuls of sticky clay and straw into large bricks, called "cats," and packed them thickly around the wooden stick frame.

Baking the Hearth: Once the chimney was lined several inches thick with clay, a small, controlled fire was lit in the hearth to slowly bake and harden the mud, turning it into a solid, fireproof flue.

The First Hearth Smoke

It was late in the afternoon, nearly a full month after the first axebite had echoed through the timber, when the construction finally neared its end. For three long weeks, the three men had spent every daylight hour hauling, hewing, and lifting—their hands blistered and muscles strained from a relentless battle against gravity and the calendar. The heavy lumber wagons were unloaded, and the family’s few precious possessions—the iron cooking pots, the extra wool blankets, and the sacks of seed—were moved inside onto the hard-packed earthen floor.

Moses stepped inside the dark room, knelt before the newly baked clay hearth, and struck a spark into a nest of dry cedar shavings. He fed the flame tiny splinters of hickory until a steady, bright fire caught, pushing the shadows back against the hand-hewn log walls.

Outside, John Epps and Nathaniel stood in the clearing, watching as a thin, clear curl of blue smoke drifted out of the mud-cat chimney and rose high into the autumn canopy of Grantsburg Township. The cabin was primitive, raw, and small—but it was solid, it was legally theirs, and it was a home.