Chief Wapello and the Morgan Cabin

Old log cabins like this one carry the memory of Iowa's pioneer beginnings, when settlers built their first homes from hand-hewn timber felled along the rivers. Cabins of this kind were the original architecture of the frontier, raised quickly with a broadaxe and a strong back, chinked with mud and straw against the prairie winters.

Many such structures across Iowa were later moved, restored, and preserved by local historical societies as windows into early settlement life, when a single room held an entire family. Visiting one is a chance to stand inside the kind of shelter that the earliest farmers of this county knew, before the railroads, before the brick towns, when the land here was still being broken to the plow for the very first time.