Building #1: The South Cabin

When Gary bought Raspberry Island in 1983, the only structure here was a small outhouse. The rest of the island was covered in poison ivy and large trees that had survived a recent burn. Because the understory had been burned, you could see from one end of the island to the other.

After 25 years of Gary's care, the island is covered again with a healthy woods. Oak and maple, basswood and birch, ash, pine, and spruce trees are the mainstays. The understory -- young trees, hazelnut bushes, gooseberries, ironwood, spotted alder, dogwood, ferns, horsetail, and wildflowers -- is back. Walking paths wind through the woods around the island's perimeter and from building to building. A tractor road bisects the island, and we keep a garden and a flock of chickens in the middle, where we cleared some trees. With constant effort over many years, Gary eradicated 99.9% of the poison ivy on the trails, and is still working on that last .1%.

The island has seven log buildings, two outhouses (one north, one south), a storage shed, and a chicken coop. Gary built all of the buildings himself, with help from friends and family on occasion. The first building he put up is what we now unimaginitively call the south cabin. We use this building as a guest cabin, but it used to be where we stayed when we came up north on weekends, before moving to our new house.


Gary built the main part of the south cabin in his back yard in the Twin Cities, intending to use it as a guest house there. He used white oak logs -- which he sawed and dovetailed -- from the area around Cannon Falls, Minnesota. When he first bought the island, he and his former wife Elaine used to camp out when they visited... until the night a thunderstorm hit, and they feared for their lives as trees crashed to the ground around their tent. After the storm, Gary checked his vitals, found that he still had them, and decided to move their city guest house to the island for safer accommodations. He disassembled it and, in the winter of '84, hauled it by sled and muscle-power over the ice to the island. In the spring of that year, between snowstorms, he and his father Mick Hill reassembled it.

About five years later, Gary built a living room addition from pine logs, and added a hallway and a hexagonal wood-fired Finnish sauna behind that.















Inside the cabin are a kitchen with a fireplace, a sleeping loft, a living room that also doubles as a sleeping space, and the sauna. There's no bathroom and no indoor plumbing, just a dry sink with a bucket in the cupboard under the drain. Gary added a few lights powered by solar energy in the mid 1990s, and we installed a small gas stove for cooking, but the cabin is still pretty primitive. Our guests seem to really like it simple, and I can relate.















I love the smell inside this cabin -- it always smells like woodsmoke.