Physician assistant bought a 1780 log cabin in Grayson County, Virginia sight unseen – and the hand-hewn chestnut walls are still standing on stone piers
The Jesse Cox homeplace in Grayson County, Virginia, started as a single log pen in 1780 and got a second one around 1840, joined in the old dogtrot style. Daniel Eustace, a physician assistant, bought it sight unseen about six years ago along with 14.5 acres, and he's restoring it a piece at a time. Musician Helen White owned it before him.
The cabin
The chimney has a dry-stone base and a brick upper section. Some of those bricks still carry the fingerprints of an enslaved laborer who shaped them by hand. The Cox family were slave owners.
Eustace says this outbuilding went up later than the cabin.
The dogtrot
An old sketch of the layout: two log pens under one roof with an open breezeway between them, so summer air could blow straight through.
That breezeway is an enclosed hall now. Old photos show it was closed in by at least 1950.
Eustace replaced broken panes one by one and kept the original window frames.
The 1840 side and the back rooms
The enamel cookstove in the 1840 room came from nearby Mouth of Wilson, Virginia.
Shutters are mounted on the inside of the windows, so nobody had to go out in the cold to close them.
The kitchen bump-out was added in the early 1900s. A horse trough used to stand right outside this door.
The walls are mostly hewn American chestnut. A mason is redoing the chinking with a traditional lime and sand mix pressed over wire mesh.
The bathroom came with the same early-1900s addition. I'd happily take a clawfoot tub under those two windows.
A Greek Revival mantel in storage. Historical societies confirmed the style.
The back porch looks out over pasture and woods. Eustace figures this is where the family shelled beans and sat in the evenings.
Before electricity came in around the 1950s, an underground carbide generator made acetylene gas, and pipes like this one carried it to the light fixtures.
Upstairs
The loft railing is low because the children slept up here.
My favorite room in the house, mostly for that curved board ceiling.
Gaps along the eaves are left open for airflow, a Pennsylvania Dutch method. The Cox family came down from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Up in the 1780 section, the walls are horizontal boards under open rafters.
The 1780 room
Through this door is the original room, the oldest part of the homestead.
Its Greek Revival mantel replaced an earlier one, according to local historical groups.
The newspaper room
In the early-1900s back room, newspapers were pasted over the boards on the walls and ceiling to keep drafts out.
You can still read the ads, a lot of them for patent medicines like kidney pills.
The land
Jesse Cox's tombstone, found lying on the hillside. The fenced family cemetery sits at the top of the hill.
The homestead once covered 200 acres. About 14.5 are left.
The whole cabin rests on a hand-hewn sill beam set on dry-stacked fieldstone piers, and it's still level after more than two centuries.
The front porch ceiling is still painted haint blue, the old Southern way of keeping wasps and spirits off the porch. Would you take on a house like this sight unseen?
