Modern Homesteader
Pioneertown, California
Good bones and clear vision made this desert oasis
Weekend Cabin isn’t necessarily about the weekend, or cabins. It’s about the longing for a sense of place, for shelter set in a landscape—for something that speaks to refuge and distance from the everyday. Nostalgic and wistful, it’s about how people create structure in ways to consider the earth and sky and their place in them. It’s not concerned with ownership or real estate, but what people build to fulfill their dreams of escape. The very time-shortened notion of “weekend” reminds that it’s a temporary respite.
Dave McAdam can thank Congress for his remote Mojave Desert cabin. The federal Small Tract Act of 1938 gave away nearly a half-million acres of federal land in California in exchange for new owners “proving up” their parcels by building cabins of at least four hundred square feet and paying five dollars a year for five years. Wildly popular, the law led to the construction of thousands of so-called jackrabbit homesteads sprinkled across
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