In the midst of the Great Depression, 55-year-old Manoa builder George Clayton Shadel faced a hard decision. He had built the family home in Bon Air that he and his family had lived in since 1914. But with the advent of the Depression, work had dried up. He tried working for the WPA but after a lifetime of fine carpentry, he was assigned to highway work. He was no longer a young man, and the work was demeaning. And yet the wolf was at the door. He had borrowed on his home to put his daughter through college. He had also accepted mortgage loans for homes he built for customers. When they could not pay, he could not pay, and so lost his home in foreclosure.
Oldest daughter Marian came home from upstate New York to help pack up the house with mother Anna and daughter Hilda. They moved their furnishings into storage. George had read about log cabins that you could buy and have shipped to you to assemble. When he drove his daughter home, he continued on to Maine and visited the Ward Log Home factory. He was worried that they might be French Canadians, but found that they were English speakers, and fellow Masons to boot. After an extended conversation about their ready-to-assemble log homes, he was convinced that this was a good option for his family. They shook hands on the sale of a new log home. George bought a plot of land at 111 S. Sproul Road in Broomall, and had the cabin parts shipped on a truck to that site. He then assembled the new family home and they moved there in 1941.
Daughter Hilda lived with her parents in that home through the war years, and got a job at the nearby Broomall Presbyterian Home. After the war she married Walter Lucas and became known to several generations of Marple residents as Hilda Lucas. Mother Anna died at the cabin in 1951, and father George followed in 1956. The cabin passed to a new generation of owners.
Sadly, the cabin, a treasured Marple home due to its history and its occupants, was a victim of Covid, demolished in 2021 to be replaced by a new home. But if you are interested in your own log cabin, Ward Cedar Homes survived both the Depression and Covid, and is celebrating its 100 th year in 2023!
For more on the history of Marple, visit the Marple Historical Society website and Facebook page, and join the Society to keep up to date on coming events: www.MarpleHistoricalSociety.org.