Hidden treasure
The house hadn’t been occupied for a while and the grass wasn’t being cut. They saw it as an opportunity to clean the place up and to add it to their list of rental properties, so they went online and placed their bid. When their bid was accepted and they took purchase of the home, their plans to use it as a rental soon changed.
“When we went inside it was a mess. It wasn’t level and they had framed things crooked. The amount of work it would have taken to make it rentable was just going to be too much,” Candy said. “So, we decided that we would just tear it down. At first, we thought of letting the fire company use it for a drill.”
They had recalled how in years past fire companies would do controlled burns of buildings for practice. However, when the couple contacted the Cumberland Fire Department, they found out that this practice was no longer used.
It left them with only one option: tear it down.
In the process of tearing it down, they were burning some wood and a small section of the house caught fire. It was then that they realized, instead of a mess, they had a treasure…for lo and behold, underneath the aluminum siding was a log cabin.
“We just couldn’t believe what we had found,” Candy said. “One of the firemen who helped put out the fire noticed something beneath the existing structure. I was just in awe. You would never think that something would have been under the frame of the house.”
She and her friend, Donna Sharpnack, have spent a lot of time at the house doing what she referred to as “treasure hunting.”
“We found a vase stuck between the boards and we used an old dress that was covering a window to catch the vase when my husband tapped it out,” Candy said. “It was in really good shape except for the neck of it. We’ve used a metal detector and looked all around but haven’t found anything else.”
Konkus said she has wondered why it was that one of the past owners would have covered the cabin.
” Was it too expensive for them to do anything else? Did they have permitting problems? Was it to save it?” Konkus pondered. “I just can’t fathom it. I have to say, though, that I am glad that they did it. I was never into history. To be honest, I never cared to know about it. That has really changed.”
Konkus wanted to know how their little log cabin came to be. Who built it? What was the history behind it? Her quest took her to the Greene County Courthouse and the Historical Society. A deed search later, she was doing genealogy research…and it wasn’t even on her own family.
“The house dated back into the 1700s and the first deed that we could find was where John Salomi and William Crawford sold it in 1808 to Tom and Rob Lucas,” Candy said.
“Tom Lucas, I found out, was a farmer and was at one time the sheriff of Greene County. When Lucas sold it in 1861 it was to Alexander Stevenson, who was a justice of the peace here.”
Candy was so intrigued that she began to piece together several of the lives of the past owners, including the original owners, the Crawfords.
“I learned that William Crawford was a Lieutenant Colonel and one of the first pioneers of Greene County. John Crawford was one of the men who surveyed the Monongahela River,” she said. “When William Crawford passed away he was so known and respected that his funeral procession is said to have been a couple of miles long.”
Candy found much of the information about these early owners of her cabin through a book that she purchased, “The William Crawford Memorial,” published by the Higginson Book Company. It is an account that includes writings of members of the Crawford family.
What the book says about William Crawford shows that he and his wife, Alice Kennedy, moved to the home in Cumberland Township from Chambersburg, Pa., in 1773.
He was 82 years old when he passed away in 1826. The funeral procession from his home led to the Glades Church that was organized in 1788 and built on the land of his brother, John.
William Crawford was named a Lieutenant Colonel of the Fourth Battalion of Militia in Washington County on May 1, 1786.
The history of the early owners of the log cabin takes one through tales of Indians and pioneers. It speaks of local landmarks like Laurel Point in Carmichaels and of members of prominent families like the Cragos, the Flennikens and the Cooks. It was Lt. Colonel Crawford who convinced his life-long friend, Judge John Flenniken, to move from North Carolina to Carmichaels.
Flenniken has his own place in history, having signed the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, a precursor to the Declaration of Independence signed by our forefathers in 1776.
The account also speaks of Dunkard Creek and the Jenkins’ Fort, Whitely Creek and the famous story of the Spicer Family Massacre.
If the walls of the cabin, found by the Konkus family, could speak, it would surely tell great tales of the history of Cumberland Township and the families that occupied it.
Candy has attempted to reach some of the other owners or their families to piece together more of the history. Among those who have owned this cabin since the Crawfords, were Rachael Connely, Martha Thorn, Joseph and Annie Cummins, Ida V. Mundell and Homer H. Hartley.
“I am just so intrigued by it all that I want to know more. It’s been a blessing for me,” Candy said. “I have learned a lot. I spoke with a member of the family, Richard, who came back to the area in the 1980s to see Glades Church. He didn’t know much about the place but he remembered it.”
Konkus said that they currently have plans to sell the home.
They would like to see someone restore it and put it to good use again.
They have had logging companies approach them but she is too personally invested in the house now to see it become a lost part of history.
“If it doesn’t sell then I would like to move it to our property and maybe turn it into a workshop or something,” Konkus said. “I just couldn’t see it be torn down now, not after all it has survived.”