After raising a lot of tobacco and nine kids, E.T. and his wife Annie decided in 1952 that it was time to move from the hollow to the ridge. He had hundreds of acres from which to choose a building site but he finally decided on a stretch of land on Buck Smith Road. There was never any thought about hiring contractors to build the cabin. In the pioneering spirit he built the cabin ground-up using rough-hewn logs from a barn he helped build when he was only 15.

The cabin was small, measuring only 11 by 27 feet. Its hard to imagine there were three separate rooms in the cabin. It even had a fireplace in one of the rooms. The kitchen had a small concrete sink that was fed by gravity from a roof-mounted tank. It could not have been comfortable but it suited his needs and it was close to where he wanted to build his statues.