by David MacDonald
Roger, did you ever get a chance to meet your mentor? RE: My wife and I actually did meet B. Allen Mackie when we were out in BC. He had started a school, a school of log building, and I had tried to get in but it was booked three or four years in advance. Things were really booming then. Allen started traveling to give short one and two week courses and after I returned to NS I was able to get in on one of those. What I really respected about the man was his philosophy that you should share what you know. If you figure out a better way to do something you should share that knowledge with anyone else doing what you’re doing – that way everybody benefits. As I mentioned earlier, that really spoke to my wife and I. There was a lot of log building going on in the 1930s. The Chateau Montebello in Quebec, which is the largest log building in the world, was built in the ‘30s. But the thousands of guys who built that, who figured out how to do what they did there, they kept their methods a secret. They thought that sharing that knowledge would diminish their work somehow. I never understood that.
You’ve worked on a few historic log buildings yourself, haven’t you? RE: I worked out in Northern British Columbia for two years on log buildings built in the 1890s; it was a National Historic Park at Fort St. James. We were doing both restoration work and we were reconstructing. I stayed there for a couple of years and then I came back to Nova Scotia and started building log homes. What was your first year in-business like? RE: The first log building I did I built on spec: I bought logs and built the shell and put it up for sale and was able to sell it – so that was a good start. I had an old friend, Mike Coyle, who I went to high school with and he was interested in log buildings – and he had taken the course from B. Allen Mackie. Another fellow, Rick McMahon, was also interested in the trade and it didn’t make much sense for us to be working against each other so we joined-up and started Heartwood Log Homes in 1984. We built log homes together for 24 years, until 2008. In 2008 it had come to the point where we decided that it was better if just one of us kept the company going – and so I did that; I kept it. My son, Nathan Ellis, who had been working with us for a while before that peeling logs in high school, that kind of thing, he stayed with me and is still working with me today. He’s been at it for a long time. He’s been doing the stairs and railings for us for quite a few years.
Nova Scotia HandcraftedQuality since 1984 T here is something quintessentially Canadian about Roger Ellis and the story of Heartwood Log Homes. From his office at Heartwood’s Margaretsville, Nova Scotia worksite, Roger told Spotlight on Business how a cabinetry-carpentry course, a hitchhiking trip from coast-to-coast, and a book called Building with Logs changed his life forever. “I started off after high school,” he said with a halting matter-of-factness. “I took a cabinet-carpentry course so I was doing woodwork right off the bat. Then my wife and I took the summer and went out to BC – we actually hitchhiked across the country back in the ‘70s when that sort of thing was going on – because we had friends in northern BC. When we got there, we saw all these beautiful log homes being built. We fell in love with them. At that time in the ‘70s there was a fella named B. Allen Mackie and he had written a book called Building with Logs. He had this philosophy that if you got yourself a piece of land and cut down your own logs and built yourself a log home that you could have a home for your family with no mortgage. He was a back-to-land sort of guy. The whole ethic of self- reliance and back-to-the-land, sharing your knowledge-style living, it really hit me and my wife and so that’s what I wanted to do.” Four decades later, Roger has built log homes in Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and in the Blue Mountains of North Carolina. Each hand-peeled log in a Heartwood Log Home brings you closer to nature and in the self- reliant tradition of B. Allen Mackie it’s energy-efficient, too.
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NOVEMBER 2019 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • NOVEMBER 2019
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