The Log House

 I was born in Druid City Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.  My parents had hoped that I would be the 1937 New Year’s baby but I was four days late.  They carried me home to our log house located in a rural setting nine miles east of Tuscaloosa near the small town of Peterson.  Now that structure was not a log cabin, but a log house and by all accounts one of the most modern houses in the area.  This is not an Abe Lincoln tale.  The house initially consisted of two bedrooms, a living  room, two fireplaces, kitchen, bathroom, a dirt floored basement for storage of canned fruits and vegetables, and a large front porch overlooking the Tuscaloosa-to-Birmingham highway across a large landscaped lawn.  

Before my memory, the kitchen was converted to a dining room and a larger kitchen, a washroom and a screened-in back porch were added.  That porch had large windows on two sides that were hinged to swing up and attach to hooks on the ceiling so that the breezes could blow through or  be lowered when the weather was too cool or too wet.  My Dad called it his “Sleeping Porch” and it was his preferred sleeping place.  The sleeping porch had beds for all of us and as long as the temperature permitted that was where we slept.  Without air conditioning it was great for the hot summer nights but really became quite chilly in the fall before my Dad decided it was time to move back to the regular bedrooms.

Our community was in the coal mining area of northeast Tuscaloosa County and my Dad was in the coal business.  For a while he operated a small coal mine but he had no patience or skill for managing a large work force and conflicts with the coal-miners union led him to give up on the mining operation.  He then turned to selling and delivering coal.  He supplied coal to a coal yard operated by my grandfather on University Boulevard near the current site of the Paul W. Bryant Museum.  He also had contracts to supply coal to the Partlow and Bryce Mental hospitals and to several businesses and school systems.

A contract with the Hale County school system took his trucks regularly to Greensboro, Alabama where he purchased pine logs.  Each returning truck would bring back a load of logs.  Those logs provided the basic material for the construction of a house for an uncle, my grandfather’s country store in Peterson, and our house.  Although we moved from our log home when I was five and my sister was almost eight, I have many memories connected with it.  My sister and I always longed to return to that house and down through the years, each time we would pass by it, we would say or think, “There’s our log house.”

Copyright 2012© Willie E. Weaver 

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