This is an old hand hewn white oak fireplace mantel with a resawn top. When they made old log cabins, they hand hewed 2 faces — the inside and the outside to achieve an even wall thickness. On the top and bottom, they left the logs rounded out of simplicity and convenience. They filled the space between the logs with some sort of chinking — mud, hay, cement, etc… On most of the logs that we reclaimed from this log cabin, the tree like area was rotten beyond nice character. So, we cut the top off this one — revealing some beautiful, old tight grained natural oak character. We applied ammonia on the top to darken it up a bit. The cut top makes nice flat shelf for all of your pictures and treasures.

This fireplace mantel has a wide range of color from dark golden rod to a saddle brown to brown-black. The ax marks are prevalent, but the wood was appears to have been more difficult to flat hew than many other places we’ve seen. There is an abundance of tree like character.

The original log cabin was located in the Lakeville – Prior Lake area in Minnesota. That area is now, more or less, a suburb of the greater Minneapolis – St. Paul metro area. This cabin was taken down in 2007 and was probably one of the last original 1800s settler cabins in that county. The house was torn down to make way for a new, larger house.