July 23, 2026 · Cabin history · By your hosts

The piano in the walkway

Every guest eventually asks about the second cabin. It sits just across the walkway from Birch's Library — low-slung, hand-hewn logs, a stone chimney that's clearly older than everything around it. It's called Potlikker House, and it has been standing on this mountain since 1865.

The story goes that it was built by a Union soldier of the 16th Maine Regiment who, when the war ended, came south instead of going home — and decided this hollow at the foot of Old Rag was worth staying for. Having now watched a few hundred sunrises come over that ridge ourselves, we understand the man completely. The cabin is closed to guests, but you don't need to go inside to feel it: the original hand-hewn logs are right there, notched by somebody's axe eight generations ago.

But the strangest artifact on the property isn't the cabin. It's under your feet.

Set into the walkway between the two cabins is a large cast-iron frame — the harp-shaped skeleton that lives inside a piano. According to the folks who owned this place before us, it came out of Herbert Hoover's piano, salvaged during a renovation at Camp Hoover, the presidential retreat the 31st president built on the Rapidan River a few ridges over in what's now Shenandoah National Park.

Can we document it? No. Do we love stepping over a president's piano on the way to the fire pit? Absolutely.

Whether it's fact or the best kind of mountain folklore, it fits this place — a property where the creek has been running the same course since before Virginia was Virginia, where a Maine soldier's handiwork still sheds rain, and where the bookshelves gave a cabin its name. Some houses have amenities. Ours has provenance.

Come see it yourself. The piano's not going anywhere.

— Jim & Jen