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This log house was built by the Stong Family in 1855 just barely outside the present city limits on the northeast corner of Jane Street and Steeles Avenue. It has since been moved to the nearby Black Creek Pioneer Village living museum.
The Stong Cabin showcases a cultural mix of construction designs. Its distinctive bevelled key joints were first brought to North America by mid-17th-century residents of the New Sweden colony in modern Pennsylvania. On the other hand, the building's dimensions and windows are both English; the sashes in particular would have been influenced by Georgian aesthetics and the panes themselves could have been imported from the British Isles.
As the Canadian architectural historian Marion MacRae reminds us, "That anyone would ever consider log houses admirable to the point of wishing to preserve them was inconceivable to the 18th-century mind." Luckily, some of these once taken-for-granted utilitarian structures survived.
