"Widely throughout eastern North America, the log house has come to symbolize a simpler life and, for many people, a counterpoint to the accelerating complexity of urban life at the start of the 21st century. The log cabin has an exceptional ability to draw one's mind back through time and give a sense of roots and time-depth. The Port Credit log house triggers memories simply by being visible, and that is enough: it is a function that carries beyond the four walls, freely available to all who pass within sight."
So wrote a group of citizens, including University of Toronto Mississauga Geography Professor and former heritage committee Chair Tom McIlwraith five years ago, when the abandoned, drafty and derelict Port Credit log cabin badly needed some friends. It looked at the time that the cabin — likely built sometime in the 1840s in Mono Township and moved to Mississauga to be used as a clubhouse by a group of practical Scout leaders in the late 1960s — might have made its last move.
But a coalition of citizens and City staff stepped up with a proposal to move the cabin from Port Credit to the Bradley Museum and, fortunately for everyone, the cabin will be serving a lot more functions than simply stirring memories by "being visible" in future.
Like so many other, portable log cabins before it, the structure will gain a new purpose from its move.
It took four years of fundraising, two years of construction, and some major-league scrounging for sponsors and materials but the Port Credit frog house has been turned into a prince, thanks to a public kiss from a community that proved it cared.
From families lining up to have their kids' pictures taken with Santa in the cabin, to rides in the forestry crew buckets for a buck apiece, to purchases of "chain saw art" forged from surplus wood, right up to the candlelight galas put on by Michael's Back Door, the public campaign to rehabilitate the cabin raised an impressive $150,000 for the move.
The stalwart members of the Friends of the Museum, including John Pegram and John Van Camp (in the Rob Beintema photo above with Museums Manager Annemarie Hagan) have guided the project throughout, investing their inspiration with plenty of perspiration.
Fram Building Group, one of a large group of sponsors, pieced together the reconstruction and sourced period floorboards and doors to give the cabin an authentic, cozy feel.
A new fireplace has been added which will be used for making maple candy at March break. Bradley volunteers can make pancakes indoors in the kitchen rather than in the freezing barn.
The exterior staircase to the second floor, the sprinkler system and the wheelchair-accessible first-floor washroom won't fool any history buffs, but they do satisfy the code requirements for what is now a municipal building.
The real heart of the building may be the second-floor loft, a beautiful bare space that invites a bunch of sleeping bags to be tossed around helter-skelter as a group of Cubs or Scouts prepare for a wilderness sleepover in deepest, darkest Clarkson.
Outside the loft, with its tiny perfect windows, will be heritage apple trees, a fire pit for cookouts, the Bradley Museum that opens the door to our collective past, and the surrounding oasis of woods that draw you back in time to when this was place was called Merigolds' Point.
Returning to the citizens' proposal of 2002, this is what the many signatories wrote: "A log building, by its structural nature, is portable, and may gain significance through demonstrating that by being movable, it survives.
"Societies live by their stories. The Port Credit log house tells a compelling story of many generations of use, rejection, adaptation and rejuvenation. This is a story of persistence and the continuing utility of a rudimentary, vernacular art form. It's about changing context and seeking opportunity and about the celebration of achievement."
And about how, unexpectedly and joyfully, a new chapter in the life of an old building can come to be written by a community that recognizes and honours its past.