The Jack Sargent family of Salt Lake City will soon be moving into their "log cabin" in a hay field a couple of miles west of Manti.
It's a three-story cabin with an attached two-car garage and a stone chimney that reaches from top to bottom on the outside.Jack, a Salt Lake fireman, will commute to his four-a-day-on and three-day-off job until he can retire in a few years. In the meantime, there are plans for a big garden, trees and some animals. "Our dogs will keep the coyotes away from the chickens," he says.
Jack has done much of the building himself in his spare time. His friend, Don Gee, bought another piece of the farm, close by, and he's building a log house on it. And another friend is considering a similar cabin a half-mile away.
Log houses are far from the exception in Sanpete County, where a good-size building boom is under way.
Dale Nicholls, director of Sanpete's building and zoning office, said about half of the new residential construction in the county is log homes.
Cabin fever. Nostalgia. "It's a trend," he says. Some of the cabins are recreational, but others like the Sargent home are for year-round living.
"We want to get away from the noise, the traffic, the confusion," Sargent explains, "to simpler way of living." That seems as good an explanation as any for the movement to rural Utah.
In Ephraim, American Timbercraft Homes now has a new plant on line. Three log cabins, in the 1,400- to 1,700-square-foot range, and a condo are now under construction, and other orders are being processed. The modular units are built at the plant and then erected on the site.
Is log building less expensive than other types of construction?
"It can be," says Nicholls, "because the owner can do much of the work himself." Other advantages are said to be better insulation and lower maintenance costs, he adds. And the appropriateness of a log building to a rural setting is another consideration.
Don Bragger, manager of Timbercraft Homes' Ephraim plant, has a similar explanation for the popularity of the log construction.
"It's a return to the basics," he says, "a hunger for the past." That past included such basics as family, security, simplicity, privacy and a sense of personal worth.
But the basics for the Sanpete cabin dweller apparently also include a church, a school, a clinic, a market, all three or four miles away, indoor plumbing and often, central heating, although wood burning stoves are sometimes prized.
People value remoteness, Bragger says, but they also value snow removal.
Will the "trend" to the log cabin continue? Nicholls thinks so because the log cabin is a symbol of the longing in the American heart for deep-seated values that seem threatened.