Miller-Leuser Log House: One Hundred Seventy Years of Anderson Township

In seventeen ninety-six, a man named Ichabod Benton Miller acquired land in Anderson Township, just east of Cincinnati, and built a log house there that same year. What makes this structure remarkable is its longevity. The Miller-Leuser Log House was continuously occupied for more than one hundred seventy years, passing through multiple families as the surrounding region transformed from frontier territory into a Cincinnati suburb.

Log construction of this era typically used squared timbers notched at the corners, a technique settlers carried from Pennsylvania and Virginia into the Northwest Territory. Anderson Township itself was one of the earliest settled areas north of the Ohio River after the Land Ordinance of seventeen eighty-five opened the region. The log house stands as one of the few surviving structures from that initial wave of settlement, a direct physical connection to the year Ohio was still a territory.