Building a Log Cabin from Scratch posted 2/19/10
Dr. Brereton brings his love of the outdoors to life.

ADRIAN, Mich. - During the day, adjunct professor Derek P. Brereton can be found in the classrooms of Adrian College teaching anthropology. The part time teacher enjoys working with his students during the school year, but in the summer he has a passion for the outdoors.

Brereton, who is from upstate New York, spent summers as a child at a rustic cabin on Canandaigua Lake.  

“It always felt like home to me,” he said. “I have always loved old camps and cabins. I worked at a ‘great camp’ when I was younger and I did my dissertation on old camps in New Hampshire.”

A few years ago, Brereton and his wife Pam purchased a lot of land in the southwest corner of Washtenaw County. When the emerald ash borer, invasive from China, hit the state of Michigan killing 75 million trees, he was left with 100 dead ash trees on his property. 

“I had been felling and limbing for two years just so the wood wouldn’t rot on the stump,” said Brereton. “At first I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. I just couldn’t see it rot.”

Brereton, who spent many years of his adult life living in Ann Arbor, started to long for the quietness of the country. Brereton said he found himself pulling off on country roads to listen to the wind.

“I would stand there and just listen as birds flew in the air above me,” said Brereton.

He had visited Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, Penn. where one of his forefathers, James O’Hara, had lived in the 1700’s.

“There are two log cabins from when he lived there that still sit on the property today,” he said. “It intrigued me to think that James O’Hara had stood right where I was some 200 years earlier.”

It didn’t take much longer for Brereton and his wife to decide to use the dead ash wood and build a cabin on their empty property.

“When the cabin idea overcame us we got Pam a chainsaw of her own and she did the limbing while I kept felling,” said Brereton.

Brereton says the building of the cabin was a lot of hard work and a “monumental task.” He and Pam worked very well together and, with the help of friends, were able to complete the 199 sq. ft. project in six months, just before Thanksgiving.

“What it took was a lot of dead ash trees in the backswamp, a profound love of rustic old camps, and a glaring absence of funds to pay a contractor,” said Brereton. “Oh, and two good friends, Mike Powell and Jon Young, both accomplished outdoorsmen and, like us, wannabe frontiersmen.

“With those ingredients and some research in the Foxfire books, YouTube, and, for inspiration, a trip to the Ohio-Indiana border where an antique dealer was salvaging an 1830’s log cabin, we grew bold, ambitious, covetous, and foolish enough to order a truckload of red pine logs.”

The Breretons plan on using their new log cabin as a three season camp. It’s complete with a wood burning stove and sits close to the River Raisin where they keep their boat, “Cherrbie Sue” in the summer. 

Brereton made the cabin’s front door himself in the garage at his home in Adrian.

“It has a frontier look with Clinch Rosehead nails from the Tremont Nail Company in Vermont,” he said.

Brereton says the cabin is small but it’s quaint and very conducive for socializing as long as the group stays under 10 people. He has taken some of his classes to the cabin and enjoys showing them his accomplishment. He will begin making a table for inside the cabin this spring with the wood from a Cherry tree that was struck by lightning at his residence.

Brereton also makes canoe paddles and has coined his brand as “Bobcat Paddles.” He has a love for wooden boats and in 2005 spent nine days making a dugout canoe while on vacation. He is also a recently published author, producing his first book, “Campsteading: Family, Place and Experience at Squam Lake, New Hampshire.”

Brereton and Pam look forward to spending quality time at their cabin, reading and being in the outdoors. After it was completed, they spent a night at the cabin in late November.

“We froze our butts off,” laughs Brereton. “The cabin was about fifty degrees Farenheit when we went to bed and thirty degrees in the morning. Never mind. We had spent the night in the log cabin we built from scratch, on a fold-out bed platform I devised, and had coffee and Pam’s oatmeal, with maple syrup, walnuts, and raisins, for breakfast.”