Republished with permission from The Oglethorpe Echo
James Bennett’s latest project started with the deconstruction of an abandoned house from the mid-1800s on private property in the Sandy Cross area. Then he discovered an even older structure hidden in the woods right behind it.
“We were just tearing down that house and we found this one,” Bennett said. “They don’t look like much now, but when you look on the inside, the logs look pretty good.”
Bennett lives in Carlton and owns Jeb Reclaiming, an antique store in downtown Lexington, but the real joy in his life is working with abandoned historic structures and log cabins.
He said he believes the structure is a corn crib that predates the Civil War. The owner gave Bennett permission to take the material he removed and any other buildings he found on the property.
“It’s just like anything else. It’s gonna require a lot of restoration,” he said. “But there's enough there to salvage it and restore it and put it in a historic society. We’d like to offer it to somebody in the county before we take it out of the county because it needs to stay here.”
Bennett, who was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1958, moved to Atlanta after his service in the Army. He settled in Oglethorpe County to escape the crowded city 30 years ago.
He started working with log cabins for Chick-fil-A at the Rock Ranch, an agritourism destination in Upson County, 25 years ago. He said he was working for someone else who didn’t finish the job when he took it over to complete.
He has since worked on 14 historic log cabins, restored 28 structures in Oglethorpe County and deconstructed 30 structures.
“Out of the 14 historic log cabins we’ve done, eight of them are actually in Oglethorpe County,” Bennett said. “The people that have built them really don’t care to have their properties exposed to the public, but we’ve done a lot of historic restorations right here in the county.”
Bennett said he sells the leftover materials to historical societies so the wood doesn’t go to waste or rot.
Bennett has worked on the cabinets in the Crawford Depot. He put two structures together at Hurricane Shoals Park in Jackson County. He has worked on the oldest log cabin in Union County, located at the farmers market in Blairsville.
Yet, his favorite project is working with young adults, such as his grandson Caden Berggren and Lucas Stephens.
“I can sit here and name off kids from all over Oglethorpe County that have worked with me doing this kind of work, and a lot of them are very good upstanding citizens,” he said. “That’s the joy that I get out of it. Of course it’s hard work, I enjoy that too, but the best benefits are what I’m leaving.”
Stephens, who recently graduated high school, has worked with Bennett for a month and half. He said he enjoys the work.
“You learn a lot and you see a lot of things you wouldn’t expect to see,” Stephens said. “Especially because I’m from Lawrenceville, a city, so I don’t really see a lot of this.”
Bennett’s team does everything manually, meaning no forklifts or heavy machinery. The three men work from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m., taking apart the structure top to bottom. They use PVC pipe to roll the logs to a trailer, and they use pincers to grab the end of the log to lift it onto the trailer.
Bennett estimates each log at the current project weighs close to 1,000 pounds.
“It’s really a simple process,” he said. “It’s heavy if you make it heavy, but if you use leverage and pipes and things like that, it’s a simple process. I mean, here we are, three of us, we’re picking up 1,000-pound logs, putting them on that trailer. That’s how simple the process is because they did all the hard work back in 1831 to notch them.”
They were able to deconstruct the top half of the structure after two days of work. Bennett thinks they will have the entire structure disassembled within a week.
“It’s a long journey,” he said. “There’s dangers, but like I say, there’s the benefits. Lot of people don’t know who we are or what we do. We look like we’re just destroying properties that are of historic value, but there’s other historic sites throughout Georgia that are getting this material. It’d be awesome if somebody else in Oglethorpe County could open up other historic sites like there are all over the place.”
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