Log Cabin Captures a Moment in History

by Roxana Currie

When I first met this rustic relic of the past, I was a wide-eyed romantic about Iowa’s log cabin period from 1845 through the Civil War. But early discussions with the experts had convinced me the cabin couldn’t be that old, so my heart danced only moderately at my first glimpse.

Oh, but it looked old. It had been reshingled with asphalt and listed terribly to one side despite the best effort of a steel cable to hold it square. Even columbine and blue bells brightening the tall grass around it couldn’t create a homey feeling. But it was a real log building, rough, squared logs, chinked with some gray, crumbling mortar.

I obeyed the owner’s order not to enter the cabin, ducked my head through the door and craned my neck to take it all in. The dim interior, crowded with the typical accumulation of rural Iowa’s “empty” out-buildings, looked less like an old shed. There was a loft over the north end, intact, but without access. The odd windows sitting on the ground in the south wall took on the shape of a fireplace long gone. Yes, it was a house, lived in by sturdy pioneers who traveled here by covered wagon, stumped out a farmstead, and built a community.

The earthy smell of well-ventilated age swept me into the past. I had to answer the mystery of this cabin. What was it’s particular story? Who built it? And how old was it really?

The current owner was a single woman from Des Moines who had remodeled a pre-Civil War frame house on the acreage into a summer cottage. She had only a tidbit of information about the cabin, but she had faithfully propped and prodded it into staying upright for 60 years. When she bought the place, the seller had told her the cabin was a historic site. The site of what, no one seemed to know.

The only presenting clues were land records. The acreage had come to her from James Brendel, who farmed it for 20 years. He’d purchased it from N. R. Kuntz, a Polk City businessman who speculated in land. Kuntz owned the farm for 50 years, renting it to various tenants. He’d bought it from Peter Gfeller, and in 1856 Gfeller had bought it from the original owner, John B. Neuenschwander.
Land records suggested that Kuntz wouldn’t have built the cabin, since he only rented out the land. So it surely was built before 1863. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources was interested in looking at it now, and after a look confirmed it was probably a pre-Civil War cabin.

Gfeller was the only name on the land records that any local person still carried. A call to Norman Gfeller, a retired farmer active in our local Kiwanis, added an enthusiastic investigator to the Mystery of the Log Cabin, one who became even more enthusiastic after deducing that his grandfather had been born in it.

Yet, even the birth of a grandfather is hardly a historic event. The mystery appeared to be sealed in the past until a Des Moines Register article appeared. The reporter, unable to answer a reader’s question about a Mennonite cemetery in the north part of Des Moines, quoted a Historical Society publication, The Mennonites in Iowa, and listed the names of the only Mennonites known to settle in Polk County; Leichty, Gehman (Lehman?), Snyder, Gfeller, Nussbaum, and Neuenschwander! (I was phoning the library even as I finished reading the article.) The meeting place of Polk County’s only Mennonite community certainly would be a historic site.

In Mennonites In Iowa, Melvin Gingerich wrote that John and Peter Neuenschwander and Isaac Nussbaum had been part of a Mennonite community in Putnam County, Ohio, for 20 years after leaving Switzerland. They came to Polk County, Iowa, buying land in 1849, land first being offered for sale in 1848. Peter was 73 years of age. He bought 86 acres of land; his son, John, 280. Nussbaums also bought land in Madison Township in ‘49. Leichtys came in ‘50.

The Mennonite custom was for visiting preachers to come and lead worship in these small, leaderless congregations as often as possible. When the congregation grew, and desired it, leadership was chosen from within the group., In the Polk County group, Joseph Schroeder was not ordained to the office of preacher, nor John Neuenschwander to the office of deacon, until August of 1858. That’s when the church was officially formed. The cabin had been sold to Gfeller two years earlier, but the fact that John was chosen deacon probably recognizes his leadership of the group over the past 10 years. It seems nearly certain thy met in his home. our historic site, from 1849 through 1856.

John had 14 children, and tradition urged him to provide land for them. By 1864 he had accumulated enough land to give his sons Peter and Daniel each 120 acres, his daughter Anna, who had married Preacher Schroeder, 46 1/2 acres, and daughters Elizabeth and Catherine each 15 acres.
Elizabeth and Catherine were married to John and Jacob Beutler. The Beutlers were the first Mennonite settlers in Mahaska County, Iowa, and it was common for the sparsely populated congregations to go to another community to find husbands and wives for their sons and daughters.

The Gfellers were from Switzerland, and came to Iowa in 1856. Family history records a strong reformed background, but Gingerich’s book lists them as part of the Mennonite Church of Polk County. Peter and Anna’s daughter, Rosa, married John Neuenschwander’s son, Peter. Only the three youngest Gfellers were born in the cabin, Wilhelm (Norman’s grandfather), Peter Herman, and Christina.

In writings P. H. Gfeller described “their home in Iowa, which was a log cabin...The cabin was located near the timber along the Des Moines River and a small creek, which provided a place to swim and fish. The timber yielded wood, nuts, wild cherries and apples.”

By 1874, the Gfellers also needed more land, and Peter set out for Dickinson County, Kansas, arriving there with the grasshopper invasion. The next spring the entire Gfeller family joined him there. The cabin may have been empty since then, unless one of Kuntz’ renters lived in it.

In 1933, Gingerich interviewed 74 year old Jacob Liechty Jr., who may have been the last to remember the Mennonite Community he was part of as a child. He related that the services were always in homes, and always in German. He attended with his aunt and uncle, Daniel Beery and Elizabeth Nussbaum Beery, in his overalls like the rest of the men. No one had Sunday clothes, but he didn’t remember that anyone dressed differently than the rest of the community.

A partial list of Swiss immigrants in Northern Polk County before the Civil War, by genealogist Dave Ringgenberg, notes John, Jacob, and Ulrich Liechty, John Werstberg, Abraham Amstutz, Conrad and Hohann Moekley, Frederick Manz, and Peter Gfeller. Gingerich adds Beutlers, Jacob Gehmen, and Preacher Singer, noting that in 1865 Polk City had six subscribers to the church paper, according to the author, a large number for such a small congregation, and a measure of their commitment. In the ten years after the Civil War, at least twenty-five new Swiss families emigrated to Northern Polk County, and in 1879 they organized, not a Mennonite Church, but the Salem Reformed Church.

In 1868 Neuenschwander’s moved to Moniteau County, Missouri. They were part of Polk County’s history for only 20 years, yet remarkably they left us a log cabin. With it’s history explained, somehow the cabin doesn’t look so decrepit. It still lists terribly to the west. It’s still very well ventilated. The years have not been kind to it; but it continues to stand, a memorial to the Mennonites who worshipped in it nearly 150 years ago.

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Mennonite Historical Bulletin, October 1996