The Log Cabin is an American Invention
Although the earliest English settlers lived in mud and clay dwellings with thatched roofs, there is no doubt that as settlers pushed inland logs became the basis for their primitive houses and other buildings. But this does not mean that Americans invented the log cabin. The style of building was well known in Europe and didn’t begin to appear in the New World until the mid-seventeenth century.
They were brought over by settlers familiar with their construction and maintenance in the German provinces and Sweden. The construction of a log cabin without the availability of rare and then expensive hardware such as nails and hinges requires experience with the type, and the Europeans of the Northern woods brought that experience with them.
As they penetrated inland, they found the forests of the North American continent to be rich with the woods they required, and cabins were soon the most easily erected building on the frontier.
A testament to this is the fact that the term “log cabin” is absent from the American lexicon for the first century or so of English settlement. Houses of stone, hewn lumber, kiln-dried brick and the aforementioned mud daub all existed and are documented prior to the first log cabins on the frontier.