The chance to own a piece of history, isn’t that the reason many of us collect antiques? Well what about owning a big piece of history in the form of an 1864 log cabin currently residing in Mequon, Wisconsin.

The owner has decided to build a new house on the picturesque 3 acre property and therefor the cabin must go. It is priced at $20,000, BYO foundation.

The actual price of moving the house can be many times more than that.

Moving a house is more about the journey than the load, says Jim Dreager, deputy state historic preservation officer at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

“It’s the capacity of freeway bridges and the width of roads and obstruction of overhead lines - the cost of making those arrangements. It’s over $1,000 each time you have to drop a utility line to move a building past it. It doesn’t take too many utility lines for that cost to add up,”

A couple of years ago there was an historic house in a neighboring town that was offered in much the same way. For a year it sat there, free for someone to move to their own property. Eventually it was demolished. I certainly hope that someone steps up and buys the log cabin. It seems a shame to allow it to vanish.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under in the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.