For the Coles of Hoover Run, this is where it all began.
This is the original Cole family home, a log cabin built in 1830. A century or so later this photo was taken, showing it to be a small, tidy home with clapboard siding and a tin roof. As any log cabin hunter can tell you, this particular sized old building, never mind the siding, has a log cabin hidden somewhere inside. Many have been lost to neglect through the centuries, but for those that remain, their value as historic artifacts make them a commodity worth salvaging and restoring. For some pioneer families, like the Coles, it becomes the mission of a lifetime.
Descendent Terry Cole returned from teaching high school in Hibbing, Minnesota in 1972, ready to settle down on land that has been in the family for eight great-greats. He admits it was the bone freezing winter of 1971 that brought him home to teach at Central Greene High School and begin restoring his family’s rich pioneer past, one cabin at a time.
In Minnesota, “snow days” didn’t happen until the temperature dropped below -50 degrees, Terry tells me. “It was minus 50 for nearly a month that winter and we got one day off when it went to minus 51. I decided to come back to the temperate zone!”
With 1976 just around the corner, Terry called the cabin his Bicentennial Project and got to work taking it apart and moving it a mile down the road to its present location. Its logs were in good shape, protected from the weather by the siding and the tin roof that kept out the rain that destroys so many old houses and barns. It is now one section of a two-cabin complex, joined in the middle by a roomy kitchen with all the comforts of modern living.
The world got to see the interior of this old house when Barnwood Builders took a tour of its restoration that sets the clock back to 1830 once more.
Terry’s son Shane lives there now and manages Cole’s Greene Acres Farm as a working farm with produce for sale in season and four campsites available to rent.
