A Hidden Historical Secret Was Then Revealed During a House Demolition

A Hidden Historical Secret Was Then Revealed During a House Demolition

The task at hand seems simple enough: a demolition crew has gathered to tear down an old house. As they slowly chip away at the abode, though, they notice something beneath the white siding. Soon, they realize that this dwelling hides an historic secret, one that has lain concealed for centuries.

The house in question stood in Prescott, Arkansas, a small city 100 miles outside of the state’s capital, Little Rock. Fewer than 4,000 people lived in Prescott as of the 2010 census. In the past, though, it had been a well-known spot on the map of the United States because it sat on the Prairie D’Ane, a sprawling stretch of land first colonized by the French.

 Prescott was officially incorporated on October 6, 1874, making it an official city on the state’s register. But these lands have more than that to share; the demolition crew sent to an unassuming old house in 2019 could tell you that. Their work uncovered a little bit more of Prescott – and the nation’s – history.

Before Prescott existed, French colonists had claimed the encompassing area, Prairie D’Ane, which translates to “Donkey Meadow.” The topographical feature was just about as strange as its name. In the middle of an otherwise thick forest of pine trees, the prairie lands sprawled for 20 miles.

And the Prairie D’Ane held an important geographical position when pro-slavery Arkansas seceded from the U.S. and joined the Confederate States of America. During that time, state leaders had to move their dealings from Union-held Little Rock to Washington, Arkansas, which became their makeshift capital.

So, if you traveled west from Prairie D’Ane, you’d reach Washington. Trekking east led to Camden, a well-protected city which served as headquarters for many Confederate troops. And a journey to the south would end at the Red River, which proved a strategic passageway. Venturing even further in that direction would see people through to Shreveport and Dallas, among other southern strongholds.

Once the Union Army took over Little Rock, Prairie D’Ane became an important piece of land for the Confederacy. In fact, as they fled their former capital, the southern soldiers began to build defensive works along the trail from there to Washington. It proved impossible for them to construct adequate defensive positions across all of the prairie land, though, because it was simply too large.

Nonetheless the Prairie D’Ane formed part of territory that lay between the Union and the Confederates’ new capital in Washington. So, if the opposition soldiers got through, they’d have a clear pathway to their foes’ hub. Their effort to do just that began with the Battle of Prairie D’Ane, which commenced on April 9, 1864.

Just south of Prescott, Union and Confederate soldiers fought for four days over the 20-mile stretch of prairieland. The Union forces eventually won the Battle of Prairie D’Ane and their leader, Frederick Steele, decided to march his troops toward Camden. They needed supplies, of which they found very little in the fortified city to the prairie’s east.

In the end, Steele decided to take his troops back to their base at the captured city of Little Rock. The journey there resulted in one of the bloodiest fights recorded during the Civil War – the Battle of Jenkins’ Ferry. After skirmishes lasting two days the Union forces again emerged victorious, eventually returning to their well-protected Arkansas seat.

Just under a year later, the Confederacy’s General Robert E. Lee would wave the white flag at the Battle of Appomattox Court House. This meant victory went to the Union’s Ulysses S. Grant in both the battle and the Civil War. That’s because Confederate generals across the country followed their leader and surrendered, too.

Of course, with the end of the Civil War came a new era in U.S. history called Reconstruction. All slaves went free, and the country quite literally had to rebuild after years of conflict. Slowly but surely, the states banded back together to build national unity as a single set of United States.

Although not a major moment in Reconstruction era developments, Prescott, Arkansas, did receive its official platting in 1873. This meant that the land was mapped or charted with all of its proposed features. In the case of the small city on the Prairie D’Ane, this meant penciling in a train station for the then in-construction Cairo & Fulton Railroad.

The railroad would help Prescott grow into a bustling city. Its original layout featured a grid of 48 blocks split down the middle by the Cairo & Fulton tracks. And local merchants relied on this method of transport to move their products in and out of town, which helped businesses, too.

 The Reconstruction era saw Prescott achieving several other important firsts. The city got its own newspaper in 1875, two years after it cut the ribbon on its first post office. In the last year of Reconstruction, 1877, the county seat moved to Prescott, which highlighted the metropolis’s importance to the area.

On that note, Prescott became a governmental and law hub in the wider Nevada County limits. Telephone lines and a water and light plant arrived at the turn of the 20th century. At the same time, timber became a big industry for the city, as well as cotton and peaches. All of it traveled out of town via train.

But times change, and as previously mentioned, nowadays fewer than than 4,000 people live in Prescott. The city covers 6.5 square miles, which gives the place a population density of about 565 people per square mile. But not every building in town has a use any more and in 2019 a crew attempted to remove one such home from the landscape.

The home in question sat on Prescott’s Greenlawn Avenue, and it seemed simple enough from the outside. White siding covered its exterior, and the abode had a simple, rectangular shape. Its facade featured four windows and a front door, too. It likely seemed like a basic teardown to the crew in charge.

However, as the crew started to deconstruct the Greenlawn Street home, they noticed something. The white siding on the home’s exterior covered the bones of the dwelling. And this structure held a secret long forgotten; indeed, the house contained a huge piece of local history.

Specifically, peeling back the layers of the Prescott home revealed that it had been built around the structure of another, much older dwelling. It was a log cabin, one that measured only 18 feet by 20 feet. And, experts found, its history may trace all the way back to the start of Prescott itself.

Specifically, the Nevada County Depot and Museum looked into the uncovered cabin’s lengthy history. They found that the structure hadn’t always sat on Greenlawn Street. Between 1933 and 1955, someone had moved the structure to its final location. And, along the way, someone had changed the layout of the abode, too.

The cabin itself measured in at less than 400 square feet, but the white house in which it sat was larger. The museum explained how the building’s footprint had changed over time through an October 2019 Facebook post.

Land ownership records revealed even more about the log cabin’s past to the museum’s experts. They found that the home originally stood on Prescott’s Miller Hill. And documents showed that a man named John Vaughn owned that land between 1850 and 160, which gave a good clue as to when the cabin was built.

Even more interestingly, the location of Vaughn’s land seemed to be near one of Prescott’s most famous landmarks – the Prairie D’Ane battlefield, where Union soldiers had defeated the Confederates in 1864. This meant that the cabin’s inhabitants may have witnessed a major Civil War battle.

The materials used to build the cabin seem to support this estimation of its age, as resources changed when trains started arriving in the Reconstruction era. The museum’s Facebook post explained, “It is made of hand-hewn timbers and predates the coming of the railroad in the 1870s, which brought sawn lumber.”

With that, the museum made it clear that the historic cabin would end up in good hands. They shared via Facebook that a local donor had handed over enough funds for them to buy the cabin. That way, they could disassemble it, store it and, one day, rebuild it alongside the Prairie D’Ane battlefield, where it once stood.

Moving the cabin hasn’t proved particularly straightforward, though. Soon after the museum made its intentions clear, a debate arose about the cabin’s ownership. Until the issue was resolved, the organization couldn’t take over the structure, deconstruct it or put it on display for the world to see.

Eventually, the museum will have to follow quite a painstaking protocol to take the cabin down. One of the organization’s board members made a call for volunteers on Facebook. He said that they’d need a team because they would have “to tear this down piece by piece, label it, store it, then later reassemble it.”

Until then, the local and online community who saw the news of the log cabin shared their joy over the discovery. Many people highlighted the addition of siding and how the home’s previous owners had inadvertently preserved history by updating the exterior.

Others pointed out interesting cabin details that the museum had missed in its initial round-up. For instance, a commenter noted, “If you zoom in you can see the square nails that [were] used. So much history hidden from the public’s eye.” On that note, most viewers gushed over the discovery of such a special landmark.

One person wrote, “Now, this is news I love seeing, the history in our country.” Another lauded the museum’s efforts to protect the cabin, writing, “Thank you for saving this building. It is a wonderful piece of history that will live on.” As it turns out, it’s not the only remnant of its kind to have been uncovered in similar circumstances.

In fact, one person on Facebook said their abode had the same Civil War-era infrastructure. Namely, their home had been built with the same type of timber. The commenter added, “There is straw mixed with mud packed between the logs. The walls of this house are about ten inches thick!”

Similar finds have made the news, just as the Prescott cabin did. In 2017 Kevin Kemp and Jennifer Alexander had big plans to rip down their Dublin, Ohio, property before building a new one in its place. Before that big project, though, Kemp had begun to pull wood paneling from the walls – and he noticed something.

Kemp’s friend Larry Daniels was there to help with the project. The homeowner shouted to him as he peeled back layers of wood paneling, he told local daily newspaper the Columbus Dispatch.

Finding an age-old dwelling inside of his home was a surreal experience for Kemp, to say the least. He told Fox News, “You’re not ready to see a log cabin inside a modern home and it looks like, just over time, it was forgotten.” But his demolition work revealed it and subsequently experts went to work uncovering the secret cabin’s history.

Dublin Historical Society’s Tom Holton shared what they found with the Columbus Dispatch. He said that the cabin measured in at 30 feet by 25 feet. And it had remained untouched since its construction, which probably took place between 1820 and 1840. Earliest records relating to the cabin list its first known owner as an A. Maties, who lived there in 1856.

In the wake of the discovery, Kemp and Alexander realized their construction project couldn’t go forward as planned. Instead, they reached out to city officials so that they could take and preserve the historical building. The couple didn’t receive any money in exchange for their find, but they were nonetheless hopeful that the move could help defray the costs of their renovation plans.

It’s not just antebellum cabins that have popped back up, either. In Independence, Missouri, someone found a Civil War-era cannonball stuck in a walnut tree that stood outside of the Overfelt-Johnston house. The century-old tree gave up its historic secret when it had to be cut down.

And in 2019 one of the most devastating storms in the history of the Atlantic Ocean churned up more Civil War-era relics. After Hurricane Dorian passed through South Carolina, a pair of wartime cannonballs appeared on the beach. Each one of these pieces of history paints a clearer picture of life more than 100 years ago.

And that’s another reason why the Prescott cabin is such a noteworthy find. The importance wasn’t lost on the museum that wanted to reassemble the abode at its original place on the Prairie D’Ane. As such, they concluded their 2019 Facebook post by declaring the discovery “a great find of Prescott history.”