A Lifetime on the Lake

Like people and their city houses, cabins have life stories. This one begins with Henry Hansen, a professor of forest ecology at the University of Minnesota, who, starting back in the late 1930s, spent summers conducting research in Itasca State Park. After two decades of Itasca summers, Hansen decided he wanted a getaway of his own. At about the same time, an entrepreneur named Burgess Bach perfected his invention for machining trees into perfectly fitted, building-quality logs and established Northwoods Log Homes in Laporte.

In 1960, Bach had his first customer—Henry Hansen, who had seen an ad for Bach’s products in the Bemidji paper. Hansen wanted to build a simple, Norwegian-style stuga like the one he and one of his grad students had designed for land leased on Leech Lake. That fall, Hansen and Bach put up a log frame on the property and, as required when using green-cut logs, gave the structure time to shrink and settle. Eventually, windows were inserted, a stone fireplace was built, and the floors were finished. Four years after the first log was laid, Hansen enjoyed a sturdy lakeside shelter of his own—nothing fancy, but a big improvement on his tent.

As Hansen’s family grew, so did the number of cabin amenities: electricity, a well, and a kitchen in the seventies, a bathroom a few years later, then a loft for Henry and Charlotte’s three boys, then a second bedroom and a deck to make space for their sons’ mates and children.

Finally, by the start of the new millennium, the Hansen cabin had reached a state of happy maturity. (There is even a garage.) Henry has passed on, but the cabin remains a vital part of his family’s life, requiring at last only upkeep and TLC.        

Dale Mulfinger is an adjunct professor in the architecture department at the University of Minnesota and a partner in Sala Architects. His fourth book, Cabinology, will be published by The Taunton Press in 2008.