Baking and cooking with a wood fire takes about half the time it does using today’s electric ovens, Ed Creighton explained to guests as he demonstrated use of cranes, Dutch ovens and other food-preparation methods during the time, 1804, when the log cabin is believed to have been built, in what now is the city’s West Side. The building was moved and reassembled at its current location in the 1960s. After a rehabilitation, it was re-dedicated in May of 2016.
The year 1804 was when President Thomas Jefferson sent the Lewis & Clark exploration expedition to the Pacific coast, and Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounded Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, the city’s namesake, in a duel.
Wife-and-husband team Elizabeth and Howard Bradford were present to demonstrate their pioneer clothing and knowledge. Howard brought along his two small but very noisy cannons, which he does not shoot off in Hamilton, but will next month at the Salt Festival at Big Bone Lick State Park near Union Kentucky.
“We come here every time they have the cabin open,” Howard Bradford said. “We like to show people were in the old times.”
“We enjoy it,” said Elizabeth Bradford, who made her own deerskin dress.
People today don’t know exactly what the fort, named after Alexander Hamilton, looked like, Ed Creighton said, but many of the oldest homes in Hamilton are believed to have been built using pieces of the fort, which stood on the site where the log house now is located. The fort is believed to have taken up the space of about two football fields.
Ed Creighton told visitors Monday that historians hope to open the cabin far more often than it is now, including times when the adjacent Soldiers, Sailors and Pioneers monument is open, plus with availability for lots of tours for schools.
“*I think it’s really neat,” Hamilton resident Sissy Tepker, 50, said about the cabin visit. She originally is from Estill County, Ky., not far southeast of Lexington. “It takes me back to growing up and doing chores,” she said.
She recalls canning vegetables, slopping hogs and feeding the chickens, and using an out house until she was 11.
“You don’t have to go far to find history,” Tepker said. “It’s right where you are.”
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