This hand-hewn log cabin was built in Aquasco, Maryland, around 1880 as a farm tenant house. Its one-up-and-one-down design, with one room and a loft, had typically been used for slave cabins during the early 1800s and by the late 1800s had become the standard style for many low-income households in rural America. Its chimney was braced with a pole as a safety precaution against frequent chimney fires, so the pole could be removed quickly and the chimney allowed to fall away from the house. The Trueman family's oral history attributed the cabin's construction to former slave Charles Duckett, who enlisted in 1864 in the Union Navy, joining the 19th regiment of the United States Colored Troops, Company 1. After the Civil War, Duckett worked as a farm hand on the Trueman property in Aquasco and built the cabin around 1880. He later probably married Juliet Blake Gross, also a former slave. The cabin remained occupied until the 1920s. In the 1970s, the Trueman family donated the abandoned cabin to the M-NCPPC, and its restoration was completed in 2002 using many of the original hand-hewn chestnut beams and nineteenth-century techniques wherever possible.