Many cabins saved because of man's passion

In the mid-1980s, Bob Rainek of Wisconsin Historical Log Homes had gained a reputation for searching the backwoods of Wisconsin, watching for abandoned houses, barns or chicken coops that he could salvage.

In a 1985 newspaper article, Rainek said he generally discovered these log cabin "gems" buried under sheets of siding on the back lot of a farm. He was often tipped off by the shape and width of the door jams and windows.

"A lot of times I offer to buy a farmer's log building and they look at me funny and say, 'What log building?' " he was quoted as saying.

Most farmers were willing to part with the forgotten storage or abandoned structures for less than $5,000.

Then Rainek and his crew would photograph the building, number each log, take the house apart one log at a time and load it on a truck. At its new location, they would reconstruct the structure the way the immigrant farmers had more than 100 years before.

"It was amazing how good the craftsmanship was," Rainek said in that same article. "They were dirt poor and normally their tools were crude. But there was nothing wrong with the way they built them."

During the reconstruction, Rainek admitted that he did incorporate modern building methods. He used nails instead of wooden dowels and he used a cement-like chinking compound to fill the spaces between the logs instead of the horsehair, mud, straw mortar and bricks the pioneers had originally used.

Rainek said in another article that appeared in 1989 that his work was part business and part mission.

"It's important to save these old homes," he said in April, 1989. "They are a precious part of our historical architecture."

While he admitted that the best way to save them was to preserve them on their original site, the "second best is to take them down and move them and adapt them to live in."