The Matthew Callahan Log Cabin is located on South Third Street in Aspen, Colorado, United States. It was built in the early 1880s. In 1987 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places along with a group of other historic properties in the city. It was one of many log cabins built during Aspen's earliest years of settlement. Today it is one of the few buildings left in the city from that era, and the only one from prior to 1885 with hand-hewn logs. It has been expanded, but the original structure remains intact. Building The cabin is located on the west side of South Third, just south of the intersection with West Hopkins Avenue, in Aspen's residential West End. There are a few single-family houses among the surrounding properties. The land is flat, with the foot of one of the ridges of Aspen Mountain just beyond West Hyman Avenue to the south. Many mature trees shade the houses in the neighborhood. The building itself is a one-story structure built of rectangular hand-hewn logs stained a dark brown with mortar in between. At the joints the logs interlock. Above the logs the gable fields are sided in vertical flushboard. It is topped with a gabled shingled roof pierced in the center by a small brick chimney. A wooden screen door in the east corner of the south facade provides entrance. The north side is faced in board-and-batten. Next to the screen door the southern addition, longer than the main block but not as tall, protrudes. Other than being sided in vertical flushboard similar to that in the cabin's gable fields, it has identical treatment. A complementary screen door, the main entrance, opens onto a stone-tiled patio. Its east (front) facade has two large rectangular windows with wide plain wooden surrounds. Similar windows are on the other facades, including those of another addition on the west. History In the late 1870s, shortly after Colorado became a state, prospectors began crossing the Continental Divide at Independence Pass in search of silver deposits in the Roaring Fork Valley. Many set up their tents about below the pass at the confluence of the Roaring Fork and its tributary Castle Creek first area they found suitable for large-scale settlement. It was called Ute City at first for the dominant local Native American tribe, but the prevalence of aspen trees in the forests soon