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(Photograph by Mark Fay, courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society)
Set amid the trees on the shore of Big Roche-A-Cri Lake, this lodge offers a rare glimpse of a vernacular building technique, stovewood construction. Wisconsin boasts a number of these buildings—perhaps more than anywhere else—but most of them have been sheathed with clapboard or plaster, concealing the stacked-wood effect. The absence of sheathing makes Cedar Lodge unusual, as does its late construction date. Morley built Cedar Lodge for himself and his wife Hazel around 1946. He probably chose the stovewood method because it was simple and inexpensive and because the eighteen-inch-thick walls provided excellent insulation in a cold climate. He tied the two-story, stovewood-stacked walls together by laying short logs at the corners in alternating directions, like quoins, and used the same technique for the edges of the windows and doors. Inside, the walls separating the rooms are also built of stovewood and mortar. A hipped, wide-overhanging roof covers the two-story building, and a one-story gabled vestibule shelters the entrance.