"Dog Run" Log Cabin

Duane's take

The way the marker tells it, here's what you need to know about this place. Out here in Williamson County stands a log cabin that has been quietly outlasting everything around it since 1851. Wm.

Williams built it that year, a settler who'd come down from Arkansas, and he didn't cut any corners. The wood he chose, cypress, oak, cedar, and stone, all of it cut by hand. The logs are joined together not with nails but with wooden pegs, fitted and set the old way, the patient way.

You look at a thing like that and you understand something about the people who built it. They weren't in a hurry. They were building for keeps.

Now, between the two solidly built rooms, there's a breezeway. That open passage has a name. They called it a dog run, and this whole cabin carries that name today.

Come 1901, the family of A. Buck took ownership, and they'd come from Arkansas too, same as Williams before them. That family held onto this cabin all the way through 1956.

More than half a century of the same family, in those same pegged-log rooms, that same open breezeway catching whatever breeze Williamson County saw fit to send through. Cypress, oak, cedar, stone, and wooden pegs. When Wm.

Williams set those logs in 1851, he built something that would still be standing long after anyone thought to put a marker beside it. Some things are just built that way.

What the marker says

Built 1851 by Wm. Williams, settler from Arkansas. Owned 1901-1956 by family of A. Buck, also from Arkansas. Wood -- cypress, oak, cedar -- and stone were cut by hand; logs are joined by wooden pegs. Solidly built rooms are separated by a "dog run." Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1968