The Neill Log House, reconstructed at least twice, is Schenley Park’s version of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment:
In Greek mythology, Theseus was a king who rescued the children of Athens from Crete by boat. For 100 years the ship was preserved with each timber that rotted being replaced until eventually none of the original wood was left. So was it still the same ship?
It is a question that is appropriate for the Neill Log House.
The log house was built about 1795, which is what the beam over the fireplace dates to. That beam, the hearth and chimney are the only original parts of the structure.
The rest of the building collapsed in 1967 and was rebuilt in 1969 by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. During the two years between the collapse and reconstruction, Carnegie Mellon University conducted an archeological dig on the site and recovered 19,000 artifacts, including broken glass, pottery, clay pipes, children’s marbles and a gold coin.
Now, 55 years later, the Neill Log House has undergone a second reconstruction.
“We’re calling it a reconstruction to historical standards,” says Tony Indovina, president of the Friends of the Neill Log House, the organization created to rebuild the structure.
Before the house was reconstructed this time, the structure was leaning and propped in place with braces. The roof leaked and had to be covered with a tarp. Wild animals made a home there.
The front door has now been secured and the ventilation hole for the foundation under the building is blocked by screening. The log house has a new roof of wooden shingles. The foundation was repointed and the chinking in the space between the logs was redone.
Roland Cadle, of Village Restorations and Consulting of Hollidaysburg, Blair County, hewed four logs so that they were square, raised the log house and replaced the rotting timbers at the bottom.
Friends of the Neill Log House raised $304,000 for the project, most of which was brought in by Mardi Isler, the vice president of the organization who also was chair of the fundraising committee. She says working on the log house has been the best thing she has ever done.
Recently, Isler and Lori Fitzgerald, an architect and chair of the design/building committee, were climbing up and down the hill in front of the log house to place landscape tape to show an additional area the Friends want to include in the project.
They hope to extend the area that the Friends of the Neill Log House lease from the city to landscape with native plants and a new aluminum fence painted to look like wrought iron.
The project also included efforts to date the house. To do that, Dave Scofield, the Senator John Heinz History Center representative on the log house board, who is also the director of Meadowcroft Rock Shelter and Historic Village, contacted the Wooster Tree Ring Center at the College of Wooster, Ohio.
Scofield took core samples of various logs that make up the house, including the timber over the fireplace. The samples were matched to logs cut in 1795 using dendrochronology, a process that dates tree rings based on climate records.
The house was built by Robert Neill, whose fourth-great-grandson, Charlie Stewart of Squirrel Hill, is on the board of the Friends group.
Stewart says the restoration could not have been completed without the expertise of the board members who represent the various preservation groups in the city, along with the city government including Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition, Squirrel Hill Historical Society, Pittsburgh Public Works Department, Preservation Pittsburgh, the Heinz History Center and retired restoration architect Ellis Schmidlapp.
The group is still raising money to pay for the restoration on the Squirrel Hill Urban Coalition’s website.
