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firm active: 1907-1921 minneapolis, minnesota :: chicago, illinois |
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Cabin for Allen D. Albert, project
Purcell and Elmslie
Minneapolis, Minnesota 1915
Parabiographies entry, Volume for 1910
Text by William Gray Purcell
Job Date (in Parabiography): February 3, 1915
Allen D. Albert Log Cabin, Lake of the Isles, Minnesota
Allen D. Albert, Editor of the Minneapolis Journal, and a good friend of mine in the Sky Light Club, called upon a wealthy Minneapolis lumberman to supply Norway logs to build a cabin for the Boy Scouts over in the park, near Lake of the Isles. Now, it seemed to me that log cabins or any kind of cabins, is exactly the thing that boy scouts didn't want, and shouldn't have. The whole Boy Scout idea is to get the boys out of doors, keep them out of doors, and teach them to do things for themselves under all conditions of wind and weather, winter and summer. The club house idea is the old problem again of substituting the material object for the spiritual value. There is a certain type of mind that simply can't establish a concept unless it can set up a material image of it, and especially an image that will hold still and stay in one place. The real concept of life is action. This the materialist cannot make himself see.
One finds this problem everywhere with charitably inclined persons. They will put up money for a building whose years are limited but will not give for the salaries of teachers whose building endures and grows.
The same thing occurred in Portland in 1928 with the Boy Scouts. A wealthy woman gave a very large tract of virgin forest near the city, and the Scout masters of the two dozen troops immediately began to ruin the place with two dozen shacks, only one of which was any improvement on sleeping out of doors, and all of which not only destroyed the spirit of scouting but created innumerable group problems in handling the boys.
One of these Portland troops in which I was interested simply put up a rustic shed roof between two large trees facing the camp fire site, and a yard-wide strip of galvanized iron on posts to keep the rain out of the food when the boys were cooking it on the table high bin-like concrete cooking fire containers. This seemed to be a practical way of giving everybody a chance without burning so much fuel and setting fire to the woods. But in Minneapolis I was only the architect, not a Boy Scout leader, and so I made some drawings for the Boy Scout cabin. About that time the beautiful hand-picked Norway logs, having been delivered on the site, all interest in the cabin fortunately faded out, and the logs lay there and rotted for the next half dozen years.
Collection: William Gray Purcell Papers, Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota [AR:B4d1.9]
