How a Maine log cabin half the length of a football field landed in the Ozark Mountains a century ago is an epic tale worth retelling.

Chapter one of our story begins several months before the opening of the St. Louis World’s Fair, more properly known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in honor of the centennial of the greatest real estate deal in the nation’s history. World’s fairs were a chance for states to show off, and Maine needed a uniquely Down East building to display its wares. So John Calvin Stevens, the state’s most famous architect, stepped forward with a design that promptly set state opinion makers at loggerheads.

Stevens was best known for his shingle-style houses and summer “cottages” inhabited by the rich and famous. To represent Maine to the world, however, the Portland architect designed a massive “sportsman’s clubhouse” made of peeled spruce logs and containing huge fieldstone fireplaces.

The idea didn’t sit well among those who weren’t comfortable with their state’s rustic image. A two-story log cabin plunked down amid the fair’s technological wonders and Beaux Arts pretensions would be just the thing to make Mainers look like a bunch of hicks.

One group that was particularly vociferous was the Maine State Grange, which was already at war with the state wildlife department over game regulation. The design would put Down Easters “in the garb of aborigines, with the prevailing opinion that already exists in the West that Maine is composed of ice bergs and wild animals,” complained Obadiah Gardner, state master.

But overall the reaction to Stevens’ design seemed to be cautiously enthusiastic as reported in Bangor newspapers, and the work began in November 1903. A. E. Astle of Houlton was hired as the contractor. He was already well-known for having supervised the construction of the Bangor and Aroostook Rail Road stations on the company’s Fort Kent branch as well as a roundhouse in Houlton.

Astle and a crew of 30 men and three teams of oxen headed for Little Machias Lake deep in Aroostook County where they built the log palace next to a B&A siding. The spruce trees were cut on land owned by the Pingree heirs. Stevens paid at least one visit to the site to inspect progress, said the Industrial Journal in December.

The sylvan mansion was put together before the bark was stripped from the logs or the doors and windows were cut out. Then it was disassembled and the pieces were marked and shipped to St. Louis on 21 railroad cars, two of which were reserved for the tons of rough fieldstone that would make the three fireplaces. By early February, the caravan was under way via Montreal and Detroit and “the Wabash road,” according to the Bangor Daily News on Feb. 6.

The 20 Maine men who accompanied this massive set of Lincoln Logs reassembled the 140-foot-by-68-foot structure on the fair’s Plateau of States, a 40-acre park, “part of a natural forest of splendid trees with walks and drives beautifully laid out,” according to a contemporary guidebook. Nearby were other state buildings ranging from what appear to be monumental Greek temples to New Hampshire’s modest replica of Daniel Webster’s birthplace.

Edward Blanding, the secretary of the Bangor Board of Trade, visited the fair in June with his wife and described his impressions of the Maine building. Among its contents were a collection of mounted fish and game from the Bangor taxidermy firm of S.L. Crosby, samples of Maine granite from quarries in Hancock, Knox and Washington counties, canned goods from Burnham and Morrill, and a portrait of Longfellow donated by the Maine Historical Society.

Blanding seemed more interested in the building’s natural air conditioning, however, which protected visitors from the hot, muggy weather better than most buildings at the fair.

Chapter two of our story, which was introduced to me by Earle Shettleworth, director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, began several months later after the fair closed. Just what was the state to do with its log behemoth stranded in one of the country’s great metropolises?

Fortunately, there were avid sportsmen in St. Louis just as there were in Maine. For $2,000 a group of gun-toting doctors bought the building, which had cost Maine taxpayers $23,000, and moved it to Hollister, a little town in the Ozarks about as far south as you can go in Missouri without ending up in Arkansas. They perched it on a bluff 200 feet above the White River where it commanded a spectacular view from a spot now known as Point Lookout.

For eight years, it served as a hunting and fishing club for these wealthy St. Louians before falling on hard times. Then a remarkable coincidence took place. A few miles away in Forsyth in 1915, the main building for the School of the Ozarks, a Presbyterian boarding school for children living in remote areas of the mountains, burned to the ground.

Officials decided the best replacement would be the orphan fair building, by then known as the “Maine Club farm,” which was for sale. Instead of moving the building again, the school moved, and the Maine hunting lodge became classroom building, dormitory and chapel all rolled into one for the youth of the Ozarks.

Alas, in 1930, fire struck again, and I’m sorry to write that John Calvin Steven’s masterpiece of Maineana was reduced to a pile of ashes.

The story would end here except for a remarkable transformation. The School of the Ozarks rose from the ashes again, and it evolved some years later into the College of the Ozarks, one of the most remarkable institutions of higher education in the nation today. Nicknamed “Hard Work U.” in its promotional material, students get free tuition, but they have to work at least 15 hours a week at a campus job to earn it. According to such college guides as the Princeton Review, the institution is one of the most selective in the nation.

Maine’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition building is no more, but by next fall, Hard Work U. plans to have completed a building, including a conference center, restaurant and hotel staffed by students, that preserves some of the appearance and character of the original structure designed by a Maine architect and erected by Maine craftsmen using Maine building materials a century ago. This time, however, the logs have been shipped in from Montana, said Camille Howell, a college spokesman.

Readers who would like to compare the old and the new can go on the Internet to www.keetercenter.edu/facility.asp, on the Web site of the College of the Ozarks’ Keeter Center, the name of the new complex. Across the top of your computer screen will be an artist’s rendition of the new building. Underneath it is another one of the Maine building before it burned.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War. He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.