Description of Historic Place

Satterthwaite House is a single-storey log dwelling completed in 1895 alongside the Burrows Trail near McCreary. The municipal designation applies to the house and its grounds.

Heritage Value

The Satterthwaite House, a reconstruction of a ca. 1895 building, recalls a brief era in prairie history when land transportation, including stagecoach service, followed a network of roughly etched, cross-country routes, and adjacent dwellings served as stopping houses for travellers. Such became the role of the Satterthwaite log cabin, built by Henry Howson next to a trail established between Arden and Dauphin in the early 1890s by Theodore Arthur Burrows, a noted Dauphin businessman and Manitoba politician. The sturdy house, of dovetail log construction, a technology brought to Manitoba by Anglo-Ontario settlers, was acquired by Jane and Thomas Satterthwaite in 1899. Now a museum, the cabin was reconstructed in 1994-95 according to original specifications and period methods.

Source: Rural Municipality of McCreary By-law No. 1778, February 9, 1994

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of the Satterthwaite House site include:
- its location about six kilometres south of McCreary at a spot where the historic Burrows Trail intersects with Highway 5 and the building's placement, facing west, on spacious grounds with a mature shelter belt

Key exterior elements that define the dwelling's sturdy log construction and utilitarian simplicity include:
- the modestly sized, one-storey, rectangular gable-roofed form
- the walls of unfinished hand-hewn squared poplar logs held together with dovetail notches
- other straightforward expressions of materials and construction such as exposed floor joists and rafter ends, sawn vertical board siding on the gable ends, abundant use of chinking, etc.
- the single centred front batten door

Key elements that define the dwelling's interior character include:
- the open one-room plan
- the exposed frame, including two posts braced at the ridge board and notched to interconnect with tie beams and the unfinished log walls, with built-in shelving at one end, and plank floor