The chinks between the logs in the cabin pieces were once filled with a dried mixture of clay and straw, and the walls were whitewashed.

Now the chinking is all but gone and the whitewash has all but weathered away, but the exposed infrastructures of hewn beech logs form what will be key rooms of the home Warren County builder and remodeling contractor Webber Brewer is building northeast of Vicksburg.

&#8220We’re leaving as much of the old logs exposed as we can,” Brewer said of the cabin pieces being used for the home, off Freetown Road.

Until this time last year, the pieces were part of a similar reconstruction 8 1/2 miles to the southwest, near Lee Road and Old Highway 27. That reconstructed home was dismantled to make way for part of a planned subdivision of new homes there.

The oldest pieces of the reconstruction – believed to have been built on the place of native materials no later than 1840 – were donated by the home’s former owner, Mike Kavanaugh, to the Vicksburg Foundation for Historic Preservation. The foundation in turn gave the pieces to Brewer and his wife, Carolyn, on the conditions that they move and preserve them as part of a new reconstruction.

Brewer and his crew prepared the Freetown Road site before the pieces were moved. The pieces, originally put together with pegs and square nails, sit exactly where they were placed a year ago and are only &#8220one-and-a-half inches out of square,” Brewer said.

Brewer and his crew have been working during the past year to build a new home around the pieces, with much of the work occurring since he and his wife sold their home about a mile and a half away in August, he said.

The home, believed to be one of the oldest in Warren County, has a new foundation, roof and porch areas of modern materials. When finished it will have four bedrooms, 3 1/2 bathrooms and several rooms outside the log-cabin pieces, Brewer said. Above one of the cabin pieces but with an open view of what will be a new den will be a raised, open playroom for the Brewer’s two young granddaughters, he said.

&#8220It’s been, ‘Catch it when you can,’” Brewer said of the work he and his crew have fit in around the work they have done on his business’ other projects. Brewer said he hopes to have the new home complete by about May.

Brewer said he has found one piece of hardened gray clay in a gap between two logs since the pieces were moved. On a broken side of it can be seen remnants of the pine straw and seeds he said were used in the original mixture.

Pieces of the cabin walls were missing in key places. Some of those gaps have been filled with log pieces taken from other walls, Brewer said.

Removing pieces of the walls has not been easy, though, as the logs are so hard that they can barely be cut with a chainsaw or have a nail driven into them, Brewer said.

&#8220It looks like the grain goes both ways,” Brewer said of the strength of the old logs.

For about six key gaps along the front of the home Brewer will use beech trees from the homesite to hew new logs, he said.

&#8220We’ve got plenty of beech trees,” he said.

The gaps in the cabin walls that form parts of the front wall of the home will have applied to them new chinking – also of clay, Brewer said. Those surfaces will also be protected by the home’s new roof, which overhangs it and a deck-like porch. Separate walls inside the cabin pieces will be insulated and weathertight, Brewer said.

Brewer said he has been restoring old homes for about 40 years, and this job may be the most difficult he has tackled yet.

&#8220I want it to be a showplace when I finish it, and I think it will be,” Brewer said. &#8220It seems like it should’ve been here all the time.”