I have quite a few people come to me for iron beds for their log cabin homes. Most of them have a preconceived notion that only Austere and Straight Line beds will work in the log home surroundings. Although the thought of a scrolled bed in a log cabin seems a little far fetched.
Through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, frontier settlers erected log cabins as they cleared land, winding their way south in and along the Appalachian valleys through the back country areas of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. They moved westward across the Appalachian Mountain barrier into the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys transporting their indispensable log craft with them, into Kentucky and Tennessee, and as far to the southwest as eastern Texas. Log buildings are known to have been constructed as temporary shelters by soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and across the country, Americans used logs not only to build houses, but also commercial structures, schools, churches, gristmills, barns, corn cribs and a variety of outbuildings.
Although scrolled beds may not have seemed style appropriate for a log cabin setting, consider this………the same period of time man was clearing the land west of the Mississippi River, he was also building steel mills throughout Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. At that same time man was also deeply involved in turning out hundreds of different scrolled metal beds to mimic the ones seen in Europe and brought to this country.
Most people think straight line antique iron beds, along the lines of Craftsman Style are more age appropriate for a log home……couldn’t be farther from the truth. The Craftsman period of design and architecture became most popular after the 1897 Boston Exhibition. So prior to that straight line more progress modern line of furniture and iron beds, were the scrolled fancy Victorian iron beds.
So if we’re going true to the period……..get yourself a scrolled bed , like in this customers photo. You’ll be much more appropriate.
