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Logging out - for now

Built about 1935 of cypress logs felled on the site, the cross-shaped cabin is coming down to rise again on another site, possibly in Lutz.

By BILL COATS
Published July 4, 2004

	[Times photo: Mike Pease]
	Bill Echols, left, and Bob McDaniels loosen a log on a historic log home off Indian Mound Road that's being dismantled to be reassembled on another site so the owner can develop this property with estate houses.

LAKE MAGDALENE - Even to a longtime woodworker like Bill Echols, the old house had some surprising features.

The cypress logs, felled right there on the banks of Lake Byrd, were top quality, even given the bountiful crop of cypress that Florida offered in the 1930s. The saddle-notching, which held the wood together like Lincoln Logs, reflected professional skill. And hidden behind the gypsum interior walls, Echols discovered two-inch-thick tongue-and-groove cypress paneling. It will be a perfect replacement for the house's rotten roof sections.

"I was so glad to find that," he said.

Echols was hired to carefully tear this historic house apart. Later, he must put it back together somewhere.

The house, built around 1935 off Indian Mound Road, was in the way of a dozen luxury houses that will be built just south of Avila. The jungle of foliage that hid the cross-shaped house for nearly 70 years was cleared away during June.

The Hillsborough County government wouldn't let developer Vin Hoover do the same to the old house, which had been identified for historic potential. So before he can build the new development, Hoover must find a new site for the log house.

He has many choices. But as of last week, Hoover hadn't decided.

"I can't tell you where the cabin's going yet," Hoover said. "I'm just taking it apart to try to get at least a jump on wherever it is going to go."

So Echols has been approaching this like somebody heading from clear weather into a fog. If he were the new owner, he would plan a variety of enhancements to the house. But he isn't and doesn't know who will be.

"It's kind of weird not knowing that, being this far along," Echols said.

The most visible contender was the Lutz Civic Association, a unanimous top choice of the county's Historic Resources Review Board.

But Hoover, in buying the house to get the land, acquired the final decision. He said last week that he liked the Lutz proposal because he could receive a tax deduction for giving the house to a nonprofit group, but it looked to be too time-consuming.

The Civic Association proposed to relocate the house to a future county park just south of Lutz's old downtown, where it would serve as a meeting house and a museum. The state Department of Transportation, which owns the land, approved the idea. The county's parks department, which leases and maintains the property, agreed to work with the Civic Association on it.

But a contract would have to be devised and submitted to the County Commission, which could take more than a month, said Pete Fowler, a manager in the parks department.

"I'm leaning to not go there, because I can't wait," Hoover said. "We've got people who want to start their houses."

Money also was a consideration.

Hoover said he budgeted $30,000 for moving the log house. Echols' bid for dismantling it was $25,000, and didn't include reconstruction. Hillsborough County is requiring that the house be rebuilt before Hoover can obtain a building permit for his new houses.

Hoover had asked the Civic Association to shoulder the costs of reconstruction, but Denise Layne, president, said her group wouldn't commit to that.

"I really think that this could have been an albatross for us," said Layne. "We've had a bad feeling about this for a couple of months."

The house was built for Alex Shaw, who in the 1930s was the state dairy inspector for Florida's west coast. Shaw had played fullback on the University of Florida football team, and had earned an agriculture degree.

When Shaw and his bride, Beatrice, moved into the cabin, Shaw planted a luscious variety of fruits and flowering plants.

Three daughters were born, and each time, Shaw planted a magnolia. The trees tower over the property today, shading the lakeshore.

The family moved to Tallahassee in 1947 when Shaw became director of the dairy division of the Florida Department of Agriculture. Two of the daughters live in Tallahassee now.

Echols, the woodworker, grew up in Lutz, several swamps due north of the log house. He lived in a venerable Cracker house made of heart pine. He explored the area on horseback.

Then Echols got married and moved to Clayton, Ga., in the Appalachian foothills, as a cabinetmaker. He raised a family there and gravitated into restoration of old structures, particularly log cabins.

A decade ago, Echols returned to Tampa and set up a shop in Hyde Park called Art in Wood. He moved the shop three years ago to the posh coastal city of Belleair. A recent customer, an affluent horticulturalist, hired Echols to carve orchids into a pair of 10-foot mahogany doors.

Hoover began searching early last year for a log cabin man. Through an associate, he discovered Echols in Belleair.

Echols, 51, considered the log house a rare find.

"Nobody ever added on to it or changed it measurably from the original, which is really unusual," he said. "Most of these old houses have been remodeled or added onto five or six times. Sometimes it's hard to decipher where the original house started."

A year ago, Hoover and Hillsborough County officials presumed that a contractor could painstakingly jack the house up onto a large truck, then drive it at a crawl to its new location.

But details began intruding.

The house was built in the shape of a cross, with the arms spanning nearly 50 feet. Even the largest trucks aren't designed to accommodate such a shape.

"You're going to have two pieces hanging off, or you're going to have four pieces hanging off," said Mike Crawford, the Hillsborough County building inspector assigned to the case.

"You can't get it down the roadways," Crawford said. "And there are too many grand oaks in the way."

Grand oaks, which have trunk widths of 34 inches or more, are protected under Florida law, as are historic houses.

Hoover and the others debated sawing the house into two pieces, or three, and moving the pieces. But that would have required severing walls of solid cypress logs.

"I convinced them that it could be dismantled, and you could preserve the integrity of the house, log by log," Echols said.

Crawford signed off.

Not everything was worth preserving. The roofing, repeatedly replaced, was a blend of old and ugly. The flooring: rotten and downtrodden. Chinking, the mortar sealing gaps between the logs, was loose and unsalvageable.

The chimney, made from Hillsborough River limestone, was a challenge. Echols hoped to preserve the most distinctive rocks. But he knows he'll have to replace many.

In a surprise, the 69-year-old windows opened and closed gracefully.

"I've worked on a lot of old houses . . . that had these old windows, and 99 percent of them were in no way functional," Echols said.

The house was more complicated than it looked. There were 14 wall sections with 13 to 14 logs in each. Echols numbered and measured every log, recording the statistics in his computer.

"When you're working with natural shapes, there's nothing really straight and true," he said.

When Echols and his crew broke up Friday for the holiday weekend, they had begun removing the highest logs. Echols predicted the rest of the house would be down by midweek. Then his crew will load it on a flatbed trailer and take it away, somewhere.

"It's a shame it can't stay here," Echols said, standing under one of the stately magnolias, overlooking Lake Byrd. "But I guess nobody wants their $800,000 house next to it."

- Bill Coats can be reached at 813 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 3, 2004, 09:02:07]