Torian Log Cabin

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, not every cabin earns a name that sticks for over a century, but this one did; so let's talk about the Torian Log Cabin. Those walls are hand-hewn logs, shaped by hand out of timber that grew along a creek at the edge of the cross timbers, out near the pioneer community of Dove.

That land has a story going back a good ways. It started as a headright settled in 1845 by Francis Throop, a Peters colonist who'd come all the way down from Missouri. He put his roots in that ground, and the land held the memory of it.

Then in 1868, a man named J.C. Wiley bought the property. He held it for a while, and in 1886 he sold it to John R.

Torian (a farmer out of Kentucky, born in 1836, died in 1909), and that's when the cabin got the name it still carries today. The Torian family didn't just pass through. They stayed.

Generation after generation, family members occupied that cabin, all the way up into the 1940s. Nearly a hundred years of livin' under those hand-hewn logs. Then in 1976, somebody decided that cabin deserved better than to just quietly disappear; so they moved it.

About four miles, to the site where it stands now. All that history, relocated four miles down the road. Some things, it turns out, are worth moving.

What the marker says

This cabin of hand-hewn logs was built along a creek at the edge of the cross timbers near the pioneer community of Dove. It originally stood on a headright settled in 1845 by Francis Throop, a Peters colonist from Missouri. J.C.Wiley bought the property in 1868. He sold it in 1886 to John R. Torian (1836-1909), a farmer from Kentucky. Torian family members occupied the structure until the 1940s. The cabin was moved about four miles to this site in 1976.