My g-g-g-g-g-grandparents, James and Elloner (Williamson) Brewster, moved from Rockingham county, Virginia, to Jessamine county, Kentucky, in the latter part of the 18th century. The house where they lived during their final years still stands along the Harrodsburg Pike. It is known, on the National Register of Historic Places, as the Nathaniel Dunn House, since its ownership passed to James and Elloner's son-in-law (the husband of their daughter Polly) after their deaths. In the summer of 2003, my cousin Marilyn Cheney traveled to Jessamine county and located this house. The present owner, Jack Wilkinson, showed Marilyn through the entire house which he and his family have remodeled. Another cousin, Connie Shotts also visited the Brewster house recently, and sent us several photos, which we've included in our Brewster home tour.
The article below appeared 9 January 1982 in the Lifestyle section of The Saturday Herald and Leader, Lexington, Kentucky, and describes in detail the construction and remodeling of this historic house. Parts of the photocopy from which I transcribed it were illegible and I hope somebody will be able to fill in the blanks and correct any errors I might have made.
Log house indebted to past, present
Family enjoys fruits of old and new labor
By Gladys Lee Maslin
Staff WriterJack Wilkinson stood in a small cemetery that overlooks his log house. He talked about the pioneers who built it and pointed out tombstones of people who farmed where he farms, lived where he lives.
"I do a lot of imagining about the people who built this house. You have to figure those logs are going on 200 years."
The family farm on the Harrodsburg Pike in Jessamine County's Sinking Creek area was a favorite picnic place when Wilkinson and his brothers, Bruce, Marvin and Charles, were growing up in Lexington.
Tenants lived in the house, and "we were never inside anything but the kitchen."
Now Wilkinson is establishing a small thoroughbred breeding operation on the farm and is a partner in a farm fence-building business. He and his wife, the former Carolyn Click, and their daughter, Catherine, live in the renovated log house.
Mrs. Wilkinson trains people for ambulatory dialysis at the Dialysis Clinic Inc. She talked as she brewed tea in a brick kitchen, a one-story ell added in the 19th century to the 18th-century log house.
She and her husband believe the log house owes a debt to the past and to the present.
"Someone always kept siding and a good roof on it, that's what saved it," Wilkinson said.
"And I'm amazed as I work on it at the overall craftsmanship of the people who built it."
In renovating the house, he appreciated the present-day craftsmanship of David Bell, a friend who did most of the finish carpentry, and friends and relatives who helped.
"About all I've done is engineer things. My mother and brothers have really helped," Wilkinson said.
Also tops on his list is his wife.
"We moved to a trailer on the farm figuring we'd live there six months. It was 5˝ years before we could move into the house."
In addition to the brick ell, the two-story log section has a 1˝-story log wing.
The house is heated with the same fuel as when it was built.
"That's one good thing -- we don't have heat bills. We heat with wood," Mrs. Wilkinson said.
A wood-burning, forced-air furnace is in a cellar room that was the pioneer kitchen.
The furnace is fed manually more ways than one, Wilkinson said.
"I load the wood, and I cut it, and I can tell you I'm always on the lookout for it."
The wood-burning furnace is efficient down to 30 degrees "unless the wind is up. The house is really drafty. I spend a lot of time with insulation in my hands tracking down air leaks."
An airtight, wood-burning stove heats the brick kitchen.
"It's more efficient than a fireplace, but we hated to put in a stove after we had uncovered the old fireplace. Inside it, we found the old iron crane and kettle."
Pioneer, present-day craftsmen contributed to log house
To insulate the house, Wilkinson first took out the clay [illegible] that covered the chunking (rocks laid diagonally between the logs).
"The chunking rocks were overlapped like dominoes. It must have been a job putting them in, it was so much trouble to get them out."
Fiberglass insulation was placed between the logs, then hardware cloth, then a rough scratch coat of plaster.
"For the second coat, we threw a party -- a 'mudding' party. It got done in one day."
New clapboards have a "shadow line", a bead run along the lower edge.
"People can't understand why we covered the logs with clapboards. But log houses were weatherboarded to make them livable just as soon as weatherboards were available. This house has had siding most of its life, and there wasn't a bad log. Not a decayed log."
Construction details reveal the house is older than the [????] date assigned when it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
By [????], log houses were passé in the wealthy Bluegrass. And by [????] plaster was available in the [????] Bluegrass.
The pre-[????] date of the Wilkinson house is indicated in that the builder did not expect to have plaster for the ceilings and that the side walls existed for some time before they were plastered.
Since the joists were to be exposed in the ceiling of the room below, the builder decorated the underside of the joists with a bead.
The builder added a decorative bead to the underside of floorboards that he knew would be exposed.
Wilkinson found that the [????] walls and a beaded-board partition had been whitewashed -- and later wallpapered -- long before they were lathed and plastered.
A sample of the wallpaper was sent to the Smithsonian Institution, which said the diamond- and [????] was hand-painted and made in France.
Plaster later applied on top the wallpaper was analyzed as being clay mud, lime [????] and buffalo, pig and horse hair.
Bricks of the 18th-century kitchen were identified by mason Luther Spotts as made in molds lined with bluegrass. The brick clay came from a depression, now a pond, that has a "blue-clay bottom," Williamson said.
Sinking Creek, also nearby, rises and flows about 75 feet before it disappears.
"It always was such a wonderful place to play," according to Wilkinson's mother, the former Martha Davis.
Her mother, [????] (Mrs. J. Bruce Davis), inherited the farm from her father, Charles Spillman Evans, who bought it in 1896.
Originally, the land was part of a pre-emption and settlement granted by Virginia in 1783 to Thomas Carland.
In 1803, James Bruster bought the present acreage. His will, probated in 1808, mentions two daughters, Elenor Dunn and Polly Dunn.
A Nathaniel Dunn, thought to be a son-in-law, was an executor and bought the land, with the stipulation that Bruster's widow, Elenor Bruster, continue to make her home in the house. Dunn names are found on the stones in the neglected cemetery.
In 1847, 105 acres were sold to James Headley, ancestor of Betty Carr Lawrence and the late Charlotte Schubert of Lexington.
Headley family members sold the land back and forth to each other. In 1875, it was bought by still another relative but with a different last name, C. A. Farva, listed in Beer's 1877 atlas.
Deeds mention that the Wilkinson farm borders a section, now closed, of Clay's Mill Road. The house fronts the old road, not the Harrodsburg Pike.
An early two-story porch facing the vanished road bed has had the upper section enclosed to form a bedroom for the Wilkinsons' daughter.
The Wilkinsons have partitioned part of the main second floor to create an upstairs bathroom and new closets.
They still have to renovate the 2˝-story log wing -- once used for salting meat, Wilkinson said.
Mantels for the wing and the main house have been taken out and will be refinished.
"But they have so many layers of gunk, I haven't had gumption to [????] them," Wilkinson said.
He says, despite the work done, the log house gets upstaged by one of the pieces of furniture.
"A friend, Roger Springate, made this corner cupboard out barn siding. We're crazy about it.
"And when we show people through the house, that's what they rave about."
For more information on James and Elloner Brewsters and their families elsewhere in this family album, please visit: