Lower Swedish Cabin: The Log House That Made Movies
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
Along Darby Creek stands what may be the oldest surviving log cabin in the United States: Lower Swedish Cabin, built by Swedish settlers who arrived in this region after sixteen thirty-eight. It is the last remaining structure of its type from the early New Sweden colony that preceded both Dutch and English rule in the Delaware Valley.
Centuries after it was built, the little cabin found an unlikely second life in film history. Siegmund Lubin, one of Philadelphia's pioneering early filmmakers, used it as a location for several motion pictures made before nineteen ten. Lubin was a major figure in the silent film era, operating studios and nickleodeons across the region. That a seventeenth-century Swedish log cabin became a film set at the dawn of cinema is one of the stranger and more charming footnotes in Pennsylvania history.
