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Timothy Robinson, owner of Heartland Restoration, says his work was spawned by his interest in history.
Stacking begins this week on Heartland's current cabin project, a guesthouse for a Fredericksburg-area client.
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A cabin previously completed by Heartland sits on a rise in Crozet.
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Cattle tags (above left) work for labeling cabin parts. The timbers are fit together (above right) as they have always been. Robinson still uses
A previous Heartland project shows the roof system |
BY RICHARD AMRHINE
LEON
--When you consider all of the historic places in Virginia, Leon might not come immediately to mind. But maybe it should.Leon is a crossroads, sort of, bisected by U.S. 29, about eight miles south of Culpeper, just across the Madison County line. According to a historical marker, State Route 631 at Leon, called Kirtley Road, was established in 1632 by the House of Burgesses as Virginia's first official road.
Once called James City, Leon was the site of the Battle of James City, an October 1863 engagement that pitted Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart against Union Gen. Judson Kilpatrick and began the Bristoe Station Campaign.
James City was founded by Daniel James, whose descendents included the notorious Jesse and Frank James.
Nearby, all of 26 years old, is the Prince Michel Vineyard and Winery.
Leon is also the home of Heartland Restoration, a cabin preservation and restoration business run by Timothy Robinson. And if there is anything Robinson is interested in more than log and timber frame structures, it's the American history and personalities they represent.
Robinson has made a career of rescuing, deconstructing and reassembling cabins and old houses that would otherwise be lost to a bulldozer or the ravages of time.
CURRENT PROJECT
These days, he is reassembling a cabin for a Fredericksburg-area client who wants to add an interesting guesthouse to his property. The large timbers are of pre-blight American chestnut, which, according to Robinson, means they had to have been harvested before the 1920s in Virginia.
"There aren't many of these around anymore, and the question becomes: How bad do you want it?" said Robinson. "It's pretty labor-intensive."
This cabin measures 20 feet by 26 feet, which recalls a time when such huge, straight timbers were available. Robinson and his team will assemble the cabin at his Leon property, stacking the timbers to
Once the cabin is assembled and everything fits precisely together, it's time to take it apart. Robinson will label and color code each piece so the puzzle will fit back together once it arrives at its permanent site. He uses cattle tags of different colors for that purpose.
The cabin is then rebuilt to meet all government codes required of new construction. Sprayed foam fills all the spaces and crevices between the timbers. The insulating R-factors must all meet requirements, as do any utility systems.
"We try to keep the cabin as pure as we can," said Robinson. If the client wants a kitchen and bathroom, they are generally placed in an addition.
"I think the [code] inspectors might be harder on me than they are on regular new construction," he said. "Sometimes the scrutiny is ridiculous."
But it's worth it, he said, and it gives him an opportunity to educate the inspectors about a kind of construction they don't run across every day.
The turnkey cost of the cabin will run between $150 and $200 per square foot.
LOVE OF HISTORY
How does someone get into this line of work? For Robinson, it has been a lifelong pursuit instilled by generations before him. He recalls a time when he was young of being on a cabin construction site with four generations of his family.
"That's the sort of thing that stays with you," he said.
The job site was near Charleston, W.Va., where his great-grandfather, Loring Dean, started building cabins in the early 1900s. When Robinson was young, his family moved to Forest, just west of Lynchburg and a stone's throw from Thomas Jefferson's Retreat Poplar Forest.
"That's where I got into history," he said, leading him to major in history at Lynchburg College and pursue a master's at the University of Florida, where he produced a thesis on log cabins and timber frames. It was pretty clear to him by then what he wanted to do.
"I looked around to see if anyone was out there doing traditional work, and I couldn't find anyone doing this," he said. "This is history. This is what I'm about. I love historic architecture, but it's the stories of the people that come out of these buildings that interest me even more."
BUSINESS BUILDS
In 1979, he and a partner were commissioned to restore a cabin in Little Washington, and so he had found his niche.
Ten years later he established Heartland Restoration, and has managed to have enough work to keep him busy through every recession since. He's reconstructed many cabins for private clients and was commissioned to restore a slave cabin at James Madison's Montpelier in Orange.
He was recently hired to construct a replica of James Monroe's birthplace cabin near Colonial Beach. The white oak timbers are air-drying now and will be kiln-dried later. He'll then assemble it on the Leon property as usual and by March, expects to be reassembling it at the Westmoreland site. He intends to use old hand tools as much as possible.
The Monroe project has been researched by Williamsburg and the College of William & Mary since 1958. Archaeological digging at the site uncovered the original cabin foundation, and the project has been given a rare waiver to replicate the cabin on the original foundation.
logcabins.net, or 540/547-3838Richard Amrhine: 540/374-5406
Email: ramrhine@freelancestar.com
| Timothy Robinson says he is currently working on his final two private cabin reconstruction projects, and intends to turn his focus to historical restoration work such as the James Monroe Birthplace cabin has been commissioned to build.
He will also stay busy establishing the James City Building Museum at his Heartland Restoration property in Leon. There are already structures on site, including: Heartland's headquarters building. It was built as a private home, Robinson explained, by a Capt. McWelch shortly after the Civil War. The Confederate officer, he learned, had met a young local girl. Prior to the surrender, he promised her that after he walked to Appomattox and back, he would marry her and build her a new home, all of which he did. Robinson restored the home, and has the captain's well-worn boots on display. The former James City (Leon) post office, which was closed in 2008 despite Robinson's efforts to keep A cabin that belonged to a son Awaiting reconstruction is the cabin once owned by Jeremiah Moore, recovered from his property in Vienna. The Virginia-born Moore was a 18th-century evangelist who fought for freedom of religion, a pursuit that landed him in Colonial jails on several occasions. His lawyer, kept busy with Moore's court battles with the crown, was Patrick Henry, Robinson said. --Richard Amrhine |
