MONTEITH CABIN

Welcome to the home of Albert Lawrence Monteith and his wife, Bessie Ella Alexander Monteith.  The couple raised their family of three children in this frame cottage home built about 1920 on a rock pillar foundation.  The house features a wide front and back porch, a cozy kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and three bedrooms.  The house still has all its original wooden windows with rope pulleys and original exterior and interior doors.  The wooden boards to build the house came from a sawmill that was in the original village of Glenville, which is now under the waters of Lake Glenville.  Electricity and plumbing was added to the house in the 1940s.  Like many older homes of the mountaineers, there was no indoor toilet or bathroom.  A wash bowl was always in the kitchen or on the back porch in the summer time for daily wash-ups.

 

Lawrence and Ella met in their school days in the old village of Glenville.  The courtship of Lawrence and Ella became serious with the threat of World War One looming over their future together.  With the fear of losing her fiancé, Bessie let her passion get away, and she found herself pregnant.  Coming home to Bessie and his baby daughter, Winifred, after the war in 1919, he built this home on a portion of his father's land.  Lawrence and Ella were married, and the family grew to three children— their daughter, Winifred Monteith, and two boys, Willard Jackson Monteith and Albert Melvin Monteith.

 

Lawrence's farming fields were on his father's land now covered by the waters of Lake Glenville in 1941.  After living in the house for twenty years, his father, Andrew Jackson Monteith, gave him a deed in 1945, granting him 74 acres stretching from the main road which is now Highway 107, to the top of Carding Machine Mountain, where the 2018 Cashiers Designer Showhouse is situated.

 

The grounds near the Monteith home include his root cellar, a wagon shed and corn crib, and a chicken coop.  The barn is the original barn, but it has been moved piece by piece from its original location.

 

From 1920 to 1941, the Monteith family walked to the old village of Glenville to get their mail at the post office, shop at the general stores, attend church, have their children attend school, and visit their family and neighbors.  The children scattered in adulthood to Sterling, Illinois.  The parents, Albert Lawrence and Bessie Ella Monteith, lived their whole lives in Glenville and are buried in the Hamburg Cemetery across from the Hamburg Baptist Church.