One of the things I made note of while travelling around Manitoulin Island in search of details I could use in The Haweaters, was that there were plenty of square cut log homes on the island. Some were standing and in near-perfect condition. Others had toppled and were in various stages of deterioration. Few original structures are still habitable today.

While it's cool to still see evidence of log homes built more than a century ago, it's important to remember they were never meant to be permanent structures. It was the ambition of those early Manitoulin Island settlers to replace them with plank or wood-frame structures as soon as was feasible. Partly this had to do with land patents that conferred ownership to settlers of land they had purchased. Buying land wasn't enough to own it. Settlers had to satisfy other requirements to attain full ownership of the property they were living on. A common requirement in the late nineteenth century was that they had to build homes that were a minimum of 16' by 20' and clear a certain amount of land.

The first home a settler would build would often be a log shanty that provided them with a basic roof over their heads and protected them from the elements while keeping them safe. These first homes were frequently made of cedar logs -- which were ubiquitous in Tehkummah at the time -- and were typically just high enough that the settlers could stand up and walk around in them. Spaces between the logs tended to be stuffed with moss or mud plastered over sticks and it was common for them to have dirt floors. Windows, if there were any, often had no panes but would instead be covered with oiled paper or fabric.

These shanties were replaced as quickly as circumstances allowed by sturdier log homes that featured squared logs and often had second storeys. The spaces between those logs were stuffed with chinking that could be made from mixing lime mortar with small bits of wood. Windows typically consisted of two sets of six panes and could be opened. Stone fireplaces and/or wood stoves were used for heating and cooking.

Early settlers built their homes using material from their own land. Often that was cedar, but some settlers were lucky enough to have pine stands on their land. Many men had worked in lumber industry, either on the island, in southern Ontario prior to moving to Manitoulin, or both. There they had learned the skills they needed to build a decent home and many came to the island already possessing the required hand tools such as saws, axes, chisels and planes.

The presence of sawmill in Michael's Bay meant boards, shingles and shakes were available to build the frame houses of their dreams. Each time a settler upgraded to a better home, the previous incarnation would be repurposed as an outbuilding for storage or livestock or sleeping quarters for farmhands.