DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the Texas Historical Commission put down on the marker — you decide if these old logs don't have something to say for themselves. Now, most folks blow right past a weathered old outbuilding without giving it a second thought. Two sagging cribs sitting on stacked limestone, cedar logs gone silver with age, gaps between the timbers wide enough to let the breeze through.
Easy to miss. But pull over a minute, because these particular cribs out here in Bandera County have been standing since 1897, and they remember things. John Travis Walker and his wife Mariah — she was a Yoast before she married him — settled these 400 acres and got right to work.
You didn't move onto raw Texas hill country land and take your time about it. The family and their friends started raising these walls not long after they arrived, hewing cedar logs by hand, fitting them corner to corner with single-saddle notches cut clean with an axe. One log notched, the next log notched to match, set at right angles, locked together without a nail in sight.
Then pole-rafter gabled roofs pinned at the apex with wooden pins — hand carved, every one. Mortised rafter plates. Every single task accomplished by hand, by muscle, by the Walker family and their animals.
The purpose was practical as a boot heel: store feed for the livestock. Sheep and goats mostly, plus draft horses or mules, and a milk cow. Nothing glamorous about a feed crib.
But the craftsmanship, now — the craftsmanship tells a longer story. Those techniques didn't originate in Texas. They came west with Anglo settlers moving down from the Upper Southern states: North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia.
Families carried those skills the way other families carry a family Bible — generation to generation, region to region — and you can see the same features in old log structures clear back in those home states as you find right here. Here's a detail worth savoring: the crib on the west side went up first, and it shows. More skillful hand-hewn qualities, a finer touch to the whole thing.
The second crib uses larger, round logs — still solid work, but you can almost feel the learning curve between them, the way any honest craft leaves its own autobiography in the wood. The logs are mostly cedar with some cypress. The big ones sit on the bottom, resting on flat stacked limestone, lifting the whole structure off the ground the way a good foundation should.
And within a hundred steps of where you're standing, Walker also put up a shed for shearing, a smokehouse, and a clapboard home. He lived and worked on this land for decades, and that clapboard home is where he died in 1938. Two years later, in 1940, his heirs sold the property to Marvin A. and Lucille S.
Hatfield, and it has stayed in the Hatfield family ever since. The Texas Historical Commission put a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark marker here in 2016, calling these cribs good representatives of vernacular log outbuildings of their period and their region. Vernacular — meaning the plain, working, honest architecture of ordinary people doing what needed doing.
John Travis Walker and Mariah settled 400 acres, raised their walls by hand, stored their feed, sheared their sheep, and built a life. The cribs are still standing. Some things, built right and built with care, just refuse to fall down.
What the marker says
These log cribs were constructed by the family of John Travis Walker and his wife, Mariah (Yoast), soon after they settled on the surrounding 400 acres in 1897. Their function was to store feed for livestock, mostly sheep and goats, draft horses or mules, and a milk cow. The craftsmanship suggests they were built by members of the Walker family and friends. The crib on the west side was built first and shows more skillful hand-hewn qualities than the other, which uses larger, round logs. The construction illustrates the log building techniques brought by Anglo settlers from the Upper Southern states (NC, TN, VA, KY, WV) to Central Texas in the nineteenth century. Common features found in structures from both regions include rough-hewn logs with unfilled spaces between them, single-saddle notches cut with an axe on the corners to form an interlocking joint with a similarly notched log set at right angles to it, pole-rafter gabled roofs fastened at the apex with wooden pins, mortised rafter plates, and hand carved rafter pins. The logs are mostly cedar with some cypress. Larger logs are on the bottom, setting on flat, stacked limestone. Every task was accomplished by hand with muscle power from the walker family and their animals. Within a hundred steps of these cribs, Walker built a shed for shearing, a smoke house and a clapboard home where he died in 1938. In 1940, his heirs sold the property to Marvin A. And Lucille S. Hatfield, in whose family it has remained. The log cribs are good representatives of vernacular log outbuildings of their period and region. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2016