You know what's funny? How people think that people "back then" really knew how to build houses because they lasted so long, when the truth is that only well-built houses lived to tell the tale--so the notion is fostered that they built things well. Truth is, people built junk…and it rotted away..
You wouldn't have to go back to 1810 to see squalor--there are old homesteads all over from just a hundred years ago, to be found falling down in woods and fields.
I don’t think that the old log house rotted away. I saw it in 1952 and it was built in around 1830 out of whole logs. My uncle owned it and he had replaced the roof. My hope is that whoever he sold it to, kept it up and continued to preserve it.