Log cabins are built without nails because the walls slowly sink
A new log cabin shrinks. Over months or years its stacked walls compress as the timber settles, so any nails driven through them would be pulled out of line and torn loose. Builders instead rely on weight and notched corners, with a few wooden dowels, a technique used in northern Europe since around 3500 BC.
The idea is simple. Stack tree trunks horizontally, cut notches near the ends so they interlock at the corners, and stuff the gaps with moss or mud. Solid wood insulates far better than frames draped in hides or felt, which mattered across the cold conifer belt where the method arose. The Roman architect Vitruvius described log houses in Pontus, in today's northeastern Turkey, with gaps packed with chips and mud. In Scandinavia, where tall straight pine and spruce abound, a family with good tools could raise a cabin in days, in any season, since no mortar needs to set.
Cabins were surprisingly portable. When the Finnish town of Espoo relocated in 1557, its buildings were taken apart, carried to the new site and put back together, and medieval law treated such houses as movable property. Rotten logs could simply be swapped out one by one.
In North America, some historians credit Finnish or Swedish colonists in New Sweden with the first log cabins in the 17th century, with British settlers later copying them. Pioneers often built one as a stopgap while working on a proper house, then turned it into a barn or chicken coop. A house in New Jersey from about 1640 may be the oldest survivor. The style later grew grand: the world's largest log cabin, built in Quebec in 1930, now operates as a hotel.
The cabin also became political shorthand for humble roots. At least seven presidents were born in one, among them Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. William Henry Harrison, who was not, campaigned under the symbol in 1840 anyway. More than a century later, Adlai Stevenson admitted he had not been born in a log cabin or risen from rags to riches, and he lost the 1952 election to Dwight Eisenhower in a landslide.
Source: Log cabin
