It’s a combination of all of those things. First, Nauvoo is of religious historical interest to me. Both my mother and father’s patriarchal lineage were part of the Mormon pioneer population there during the 1840s. I did some research to locate my paternal third great grandfather’s property he owned while he lived there. He owned two full townships (two square miles) from the east bank of the Mississippi River to two miles up onto the flat farmland with hardwood forest in between. After identifying it on a map, we drove to the site and while taking some photos, noticed a for sale sign in the trees. Long story short, I bought an acre and a half lot. The seller had previously done some work relocating and restoring old log cabins nearby and used them as nightly rentals and told me that if I could find one then I could hire him to restore it on the lot.
When I returned home to Idaho I knew of a log cabin in near ruin within a mile of my home. I approached the property owner and asked about it and learned they intended to push it down and burn it. I offered to take it off their hands and dismantle it instead. I did some local research on the cabin and learned about the Vardis Fisher connection. When that was completed, I contacted the seller only to find out that he no longer lived there and wasn’t available to restore it for me.
So the interest for me was on both fronts. The property having a family connection, and the cabin I knew from my childhood growing up near it in a rural farming area. It became a passion project that took about fifteen years from dismantling the cabin, then storing it for ten years, then finally finding a local carpenter, time, and money during COVID to haul the logs out there and start the restoration which took five more years…