HARRIS HOMESTEAD
HARRIS CABIN
The cabin on the Harris Homestead was built and lived in by the Harris family before the civil war around 1850-1860. It was said by Richard Harris, who was born in that cabin that it used to be down close to a creek. After a big flood, they used a team of horses to pull the assembled house up the hill 100 yards. It sat at that same location until we moved it and restored it as the Harris Cabin at Cinder Ridge. Its current location at Cinder Ridge is only 7/10ths of a mile from where it originally sat.
In later years the cabin was used to store hay and tobacco and that’s how we found it when we went to remove it. The original wood floors that are currently in the cabin were covered in linoleum. The current chimney, with the rock base and handmade brick column, is original to the cabin. However, many of the bricks had eroded and were replaced. There was a hand-dug well only 15 feet from the house that Joe’s son Joseph found when he almost fell in. After removing the old rotten boards, they discovered a 20 foot deep well that was filled six feet from the top with fresh water. When tearing down the cabin to relocate we found a few oddities in the chinking. A buffalo nickel was found on the bottom rug and a cobbler’s child-size wood shoe mold was found in the upstairs chinking. The original chinking was made of straw, clay, mud, and rocks. The cabin now sits perfectly restored at Conder Ridge with the addition of a stick-built kitchen.
OTHER STRUCTURES ON THE HARRIS HOMESTEAD
Other than the Harris cabin, the homestead includes a privy, blacksmith shop, the livestock barn, and a corn crib. Both the blacksmith shop and livestock barn were given to Joe by a good friend, Freeman Holder. The blacksmith shop was converted from a log tobacco barn that came from the Hodge farm in Dobson, NC. The blacksmith shop is the only log structure that Joe tore down that didn’t need any replacement logs. There are logs cut out of one side of the barn to back a tractor in after it was no longer used for tobacco. It is now used to allow light into the blacksmith shop and for visitors to observe. Freeman said the tobacco barn (now blacksmith shop) was built by Manly Cave who is the same man who built the two-stall livestock barn beside that blacksmith shop- we call it the Manly Cave barn. The Manly Cave barn is built back exactly how it was when we found it. Even the gable ends are put back exactly how they were. We took them down in one piece leaving all the boards attached to the top plate and rafter. The chicken coup is also exactly as it was to the original barn.
