Walk past the church and the schoolhouse in our Heritage Village and you'll come to a small log cabin. The logs are hand-hewn. The roof is old cedar shake. It looks like it grew out of the ground right where it stands — but it has traveled a long way to get here, and it carries the better part of two centuries with it.
The man who built it
The cabin was built about 1850, just after Texas became a state, by a man named John Campbell. John was born in Dennagal, Ireland in 1811 and came to make his life in Texas. He raised the cabin near Elm Creek Road and Leissner School Road, right here around Seguin, and he lived out his days in this county — he died in Seguin in 1891.
As the land changed hands over the years, so did the cabin. Eventually it was left to hold storage, and time did what time does to a building nobody's keeping up. The logs began to rot. It could have been lost for good.
Saved once already
Around 1999, Don and Karen Dykstra came across the old cabin sitting at its original spot. They didn't want to see a piece of Texas history rot into the ground, so they bought it and moved it to their own property on FM 1101. The whole cabin made the move in one piece — everything but the roof, which had already caved in.
They didn't want to see a piece of Texas history rot into the ground, so they moved the whole cabin, in one piece, to save it.
Then they put two years of work into bringing it back. In 2011, the Dykstra grandchildren — Chloe, Haleigh, Jon, and Jen — gave the cabin to our Heritage Village so it could be shared with the students and neighbors who come through the farm. It's been part of the Village ever since.
Where it stands now
Time keeps moving, and a log cabin this old needs steady care to keep standing. Right now the cabin is going through another round of restoration on our grounds — logs shored up, the frame braced, the stonework laid back in by hand. It's real work, done the old way, and it's underway now.
When it's done, the Campbell Log Cabin will keep doing what it's done for our Village all along: showing a class of fourth-graders how a Texas family actually lived and built, more than 170 years ago, with their own hands and the timber around them.
