ROSS-WILMOTH HOMESTEAD
ROSS-WILMOTH CABIN
The Ross-Wilmoth Cabin is the first log structure that was moved to Cinder Ridge in 2011. It was built by the Ross family in the late-1800s, after the time of the civil War and was later purchased by the Wilmoth family. A friend of Joe’s, Lee Wilmoth, was born in the Ross-Wilmoth cabin and still lives in Thurmond, a short distance from where he was born. The cabin was built onto with stick-built additions and was five times that size of the cabin you see now. Many log homes become storage barns for grain, hay, and tobacco after families no longer live in them. This cabin had tobacco stored upstairs and hay stored downstairs when we tore it down to relocate. The current location of the cabin at Cinder Ridge is only 1.7 miles from its original location near Haystack Road. The current chimney did not come with the cabin. It was donated to us by Bill Johnson. The chimney came from a log cabin in Thurmond on highway 21 that predates the civil war and was beyond repair. It is said that the son of the family that lived there was shot and killed in the front yard of the cabin by the Confederate home guard for refusing to go to war.
OTHER STRUCTURES ON THE ROSS-WILMOTH HOMSTEAD
Other than the Ross-Wilmoth cabin, the homestead includes a privy, woodshed, corn crib, pig pin, chicken coup, apple drying house, smoke house, root cellar, and the Burcham barn. Thanks to a tip from his friend Adam Wilmoth, Joe was able to add the Burcham barn to Cinder Ridge. The Burcham barn belonged to Matt Geyer, and he was happy for Joe to remove it from the property, so he didn’t have to have it bulldozed and burnt. He called it the Burcham barn because it was located on Burcham road in Poplar Springs. Two of the four outside corners were rotten from top to bottom. It required a lot of rethinking to decide how to make it structurally sound. The upstairs had three courses of logs above the loft floor that we recut to replace the rotten logs downstairs. We then built a framed knee-wall in the loft to replace the logs.
The corn crib at the Ross-Wilmoth homestead was converted from a tobacco barn that the Hodge family owned on Caves Mill Road in Dobson, NC. Joe built it to replicate a corn crib that his great grandpa, Jesse Kimber Cockerham, built on the Cockerham farm. The chicken coup is the only log structure that was located on the Snow farm. It was part of the old Deerman house on Possum Trot Road. The apple drying house was made from scratch by hand hued logs. The root cellar, ham smoke house and pig pin were all repurposed out of a tobacco barn from Matt Geyer’s family- we recut the logs and made three small buildings from that tobacco barn.
