Email
PrintTennessee in the Tetons
Southern couple resurrects an antebellum log cabin at their river retreat
Photography by Kisa Koenig
(page 1 of 2)
On a warm summer afternoon, Karen Vest stands on her porch and watches through binoculars as a bull moose lumbers through the willows lining the Teton River. Farther upstream, an osprey carrying a fish returns to its nest to feed its hungry chicks.
Vest lowers the glasses, beaming. “I’ve been looking for a moose for two years,” she says.
Nearly two hundred years ago, a similar scene might have played out at the very same cabin. Only the ungulate would have been a white-tailed deer browsing in stands of cedar and poplar lining the catfish-filled Duck River, nestled in a misty hollow in Tennessee.
Vest and her husband, Rusty, have brought a bit of the Volunteer State with them as they’ve settled into a new summer residence northwest of Driggs. An avid fly fisherman who loves the challenge of a building project, especially one that involves reusing old wood, Rusty Vest has reconstructed a log cabin dating to the early 1800s. With the help of John McIntosh of Snake River Builders, the Vests added a modern kitchen and bath, as well as a loft, while preserving the original footprint of the two-room cabin.
The house combines the very old with the ultramodern (e.g., a geothermal heat pump), and the grandeur of the South with the rusticity of the West, in a project door maker Bob Pfaltz calls “the epitome of green building.” Pfaltz, of Mahogany Ridge Craftsman, fashioned all of the doors with old pieces of wood Rusty Vest collected from Tennessee. “There are very few things in the building that weren’t recycled,” Pfaltz says.
The story of the Vest home begins in Maury (pronounced “Murray”) County, a rural part of central Tennessee about forty-five minutes southwest of Nashville. Maury County is best known as the birthplace of James K. Polk, the eleventh president of the United States. The area was settled in the early 1800s after soldiers who had fought in the Revolutionary War were granted land there and the Cherokee Indians forced out. One such patriot built two log houses for his daughters, and this cabin is one of them. Rusty Vest estimates it was erected somewhere between the 1820s and 1840s. His father bought it at an auction in 1997 for $2,000.
Polk’s connection to Maury County is more than local trivia. During the Civil War, Union soldiers, mindful of Polk’s heritage (as well as that of former President Andrew Jackson, a fellow Tennessean), spared the county the scorched-earth destruction inflicted on other areas of the South. Antebellum mansions were preserved there, and years later Rusty Vest would collect hearthstones and other bits and pieces from these historical buildings for his home in Teton Valley.
A businessman who made his money selling fiberglass insulation and other building materials, Vest speaks in a drawl that brings to mind things like molasses and bourbon whiskey. His eyes shine with enthusiasm as he talks about the origin of each piece of wood in the house.
“I like to take old things down [for reuse],” he says. “I hate to see them destroyed.”
Originally, the poplar cabin measured forty-four feet wide by eighteen feet long. It consisted of two rooms, likely one for cooking and one for sleeping, each eighteen by eighteen, separated by an open breezeway Vest calls a “dog trot.” He speculates that the layout was designed to help keep the cabin’s interior cooler in the sweltering Tennessee heat. He also surmises that the exterior was covered in poplar siding, which would help explain why the logs are so well preserved and haven’t suffered the amount of water and insect damage one might expect. “We were totally amazed,” says McIntosh, the builder. “Some of [the wood] was really remarkably solid.”
