A small log building that has been a fixture in the Horse Creek community for nearly 150 years will soon vanish from Polk County.

“It will be a change to see it gone,” said former Horse Creek Store owner Gordon Nelson. “I’ve looked at it since I was four.”

The building, which measures approximately 17-by-28 feet, was the original Horse Creek Store, from roughly 1860 to 1880. It is directly across the road from the current Horse Creek Store at the intersection of County Roads X and M.

A Scandia, Minn., company called Rustic Innovations, owned by Curt Richter, is in the process of dismantling the structure so that it can be shipped to the Houston area and reassembled for use as a cabin. A young doctor plans to put it on his property in Montgomery, Texas, about 35 miles north/northwest of Houston.

Richter said the reassembled building “will have porches on both sides so the wonderful logs can be exposed but still protected.”

Those hardwood logs—mostly oak, Richter believes—were covered with tin outside and boards inside for most of the building’s life. Nelson, who owned the Horse Creek Store with his wife, Audrey, from 1963 to 1998, doesn’t know when the metal was put on.

“If I had known (the logs) were that nice I wouldn’t have taken it down,” Nelson quips. “No; it had to come down. . . . It was rotting in certain spots.”

Nelson, who still owns the land the building sits on, was wondering what could be done with the building when he happened to see a newspaper story about Richter’s Rustic Innovations company, which encourages the preservation of old buildings. That is not always possible at the original location, Richter said, so Rustic Innovations tries to find new owners and new uses for old buildings.

Nelson contacted Richter, who checked out the building and expressed interest in it.

By marketing it on the Internet, Richter enticed several potential buyers to make an inspection visit to Horse Creek, including the eventual buyer.

“The building is Curt’s,” Nelson said. “I sold it to him. I told him, ‘You can have it, if you get rid of it.’ That’s the way it went.”

Some of the large logs are highly tapered, with the taper running in opposite directions on adjacent logs.

“What interests me is the corners—how close a tolerance (there is),” Nelson said. “You know, without having a chain saw or anything else, how close they cut those to fit. They did a good job when they built it.”

Some of the corner joints are dovetail joints, others block joints.

“We don’t know who built it,” Nelson said. “As far as who started it [the store], I think it was a guy by the name of Brevold. I remember hearing that name. We think it was built about 1860—maybe a little before, maybe a little after. It didn’t carry a full line of groceries. My dad told me—and of course he didn’t remember it either—that they carried the basics: salt, sugar, flour, tobacco I suppose, candy. And I’m sure there wasn’t a lot of money exchanged; I’m sure it was barter at that time.”

The building ended its life as a store when a larger store building—not the existing one, which came later—was built across the road in 1880 or 1881.

Nelson’s grandfather came from New Richmond, where he worked in a store, to take over the Horse Creek Store in 1904. He passed on the business to his son, Gordon Nelson’s father.

“My grandfather and my dad both used this building as extra storage,” Nelson said. “And I guess I used it for storage too. That’s about all that the Nelsons ever had to do with it. . . . There were many antiques stored in there, we realized when we had an auction [in 1988]. . . . Many old store items were kept in there. Anything from 1904 on that didn’t sell, we were Norwegian enough that nothing got thrown away. It was: ‘Well, take it across the road.’ So there was a lot of stuff in there.”

Replaced store equipment, such as old counters and scales, also found its way across the road and into the old building.

Nelson, who now lives along County Road S [Rustic Road 101], isn’t sure how many residents the Horse Creek area had when the first store was built around 1860.

“The building was originally built as a small store with living quarters in the back,” he said. “And then you can see where they cut the logs out to make the whole store bigger. Then there was an addition that was put on on the west side, and that was living quarters. I’m not sure just what kind of an arrangement they had. I tore those living quarters off, maybe in 1969 or 1970.”

There also was an upstairs bedroom in the attic-like space above the ground floor living quarters, which took up only about one-third of the floor space. At first there was an outside stairway to the upper level bedroom. Later an inside stairway was cut in.

The logs were marked before the disassembly began so that they can be reassembled in the same position. Rustic Innovations offers the buyer a log cleaning option, as well as reassembly supervision.

“The new owner would need to have a contractor for the labor or hire his own laborers,” Richter said.

Richter said the Texas buyer “will be using other recycled materials to build a small stone-covered addition to provide more room. Both Rustic Innovations and the homeowner plan to recycle as much as possible from the old store, possibly even down to the stone foundation.”

Nelson said he plans to take a trip to Texas to see the building after it is reassembled.

“I’m glad it’s going to someplace I can go and see it again,” he said, “to Montgomery, Texas.”