My father purchased this house which started it's long history as the Richter cabin and was situated upon a lot that had been struck off from the adjacent farm and sold to a freed slave following the Civil War. The various owners had, over the course of the years, made improvements to the building; cladding it in German siding (over the original clap board), adding two rooms, front and side, laying T&G flooring over the rough planks of the floor in the original cabin's second story, and in short converting this structure into a house.
Restoration of the Richter Cabin Germantown Maryland
The renovation of this house was a daunting undertaking. It had no storm windows, antique double hung wood sash, an inoperable oil fired furnace, an open, stone lined well 12 feet across and 20 ft deep- and contaminated too- and no indoor plumbing (note the outbuildings in the photo below). It had a rubble foundation (in which the foundation consists of a layer or two of large rocks loosely mortared together) and no insulation in the exterior walls. On top of all this, the house was sheathed in this thick asbestos siding with a faux masonry finish.
The house needed much work, and getting it up and in working order was quite a task. During the course of this undertaking, my father impressed upon me a healthy respect for the techniques and materials which went into the building of this structure of a bygone era, and I in turn developed an interest in both these techniques and materials, as well as antiques in general.
An addition was made to the structure, built by my father, two brothers and myself, in the early 1970's.
To it's credit, the house was situated on an acre lot in Germantown, and underneath all of this deplorable asbestos siding the German siding was not in bad shape, and when the restoration was complete, was an appreciable restoration of a house from it's time. It looked good.
In time I would have the opportunity to restore the interior of the cabin (single handedly as it turns out) and was glad to have the opportunity to have worked on such a project. It took over six months to complete, and required over a ton of mortar, dry weight, mixed and applied by hand, to finish the project.
But the application of the mortar would be the easy part. Getting to the point that the mortaring could be done, getting all of the plaster, lath, wiring, studs, and nails which had been tacked on and added to this log cabin in the process of converting it into a home, would require weeks of work.
It is my understanding that this particular type of joinery, notching of the timbers, chinking of the log walls and 1 1/2 storey structure identify this cabin to be of German construction, and of a type dating to the early 1800's. Given that a certain German farmer by the name of Richter and namesake of Richter Farm Road here in Germantown Maryland, had built a log cabin at approximately this 1800 time frame and in this general location, I suspect this cabin to have been constructed by the Richter's...
The widening of Clopper Road had accelerated the process of the deterioration of the foundation and the infiltration of humidity. In November 2008, this house in which I had lived from childhood and into which I had put so much work and maintenance, was both unsightly and unsafe. It had to be demolished.
But I still had one more building to add to my collection...
In the year 2000 I purchased this mid 19th cent. brick town house on a double lot in downtown Frederick Maryland. Here it is seen as it was left, with the restoration all but complete.
It all makes sense now, the hundreds of barrel staves strewn about the property,the remnants of the stone foundations of a couple outbuildings protruding from the surface of the back yard, the well worn path leading down the hill to the stream, flanked by old refuse dump sites long covered over.
Antiquated, rusted farm implements here and there, and numerous trails leading through the surrounding woods, of which representatives of old growth are to be found but few and far between, IMHO. Most of the land in this vicinity had been cleared at one point in time.
I don't know for a fact that this is Johannes Richter's cabin, but my understanding is that it was in this general vicinity;
I do know that the Leaman family, my former neighbors, bought their farmland from the Richter's when they moved to
Germantown in the 19th century, so It seems a fair assumption that this cabin had been situated on Richter's Farm.
The ceiling joists of this 1 1/2 storey cabin had been removed to afford modern headroom and ceiling, but the
ends of the joists were left in place and readily identifiable as such.
The rafters of this cabin consisted of stout pine branches, between 3"-4" at base and denuded of stems, leaving nodes where said were removed. The Rafters tapered per nature (not trimmed) to the apex. The roof was of wood shigle, but the framework to which they were attached (of 1"x 2"'s at right angles h. and v.) were band sawn, as were the clap board siding to be found underneath the German siding on some portions of the cabin, and hence not original.
The floor joists of the second storey were undersized, much so, and there was considerable motion of the floor when moving about. The floor wasn't going anywhere, but this could be disconcerting, if not outright frightening...
