Chris Rossi/The Gazette This log cabin, built by a renowned Bethesda physician Charles Armstrong during the Great Depression, is being moved to Cabin John Park.

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Chris Rossi/The Gazette Wayne Warfield, senior mason with the county Parks Department, clears out what will be the new foundation for a log cabin, built by a renowned Bethesda physician Charles Armstrong during the Great Depression, at Cabin John Park.
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Chris Rossi/The Gazette Wayne Warfield, senior mason with the county Parks Department, clears out what will be the new foundation for a log cabin, built by a renowned Bethesda physician Charles Armstrong during the Great Depression, at Cabin John Park.
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Tess Colwell/The Gazette Mary Armstrong of Chevy Chase paid for her father’s log cabin to be relocated to Cabin John Park.
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Tess Colwell/The Gazette Mary Armstrong of Chevy Chase paid for her father’s log cabin to be relocated to Cabin John Park.
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Tess Colwell/The Gazette Mary Armstrong of Chevy Chase paid for her father’s log cabin to be relocated to Cabin John Park.

Chris Rossi/The Gazette This log cabin, built by a renowned Bethesda physician Charles Armstrong during the Great Depression, is being moved to Cabin John Park.

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Early Friday morning, when most people still were asleep, a construction crew loaded a one-room log cabin onto a flatbed truck and hauled it from among the poplar trees outside the Rockville neighborhood of Tilden Woods to a pre-made foundation in Cabin John Park.

The cabin brought along with it the legacy of a Bethesda scientist whose work once changed the world.

The cabin was built by hand more than 70 years ago by Charles Armstrong, a noted virologist who helped create a vaccine for polio that, in the 1950s, helped eliminate the disease as a health issue in the U.S. The cabin was set to be demolished this year until Armstrong’s daughter, Mary Armstrong of Chevy Chase, offered to save it. She plans to help create a lasting memorial to her father out of the rural retreat where he spent his weekends.

“He loved it,” said Mary Armstrong, 87. “He always said some of his best ideas came when he was gardening or busy pulling weeds there.”

Armstrong, who died in 1967 at 81, is well-known in academic circles. The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where he once served as chief of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, keeps his biography, and a bust of him can be found near Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s at the Polio Hall of Fame in Warm Springs, Ga. His work in adapting a strain of the polio virus that could be given to laboratory mice helped lead other researchers to develop the polio vaccine still used today, according to his biography, written in 2007 by fellow virologist Edward Beeman.

Mary Armstrong, a retired public school teacher, said she and her family used the cabin as a retreat until the Montgomery County and county’s Department of Parks bought it in two parts two years ago, along with the 16 acres of land that surrounded it.

William Gries, a land acquisition specialist for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, said the county bought 11 acres from Armstrong for $10.1 million to build Montrose Parkway West, the largest road project ever undertaken by the county. The Department of Parks then bought the remaining 5.6 acres — where the cabin once sat — for $2.48 million to provide a buffer from the new road for nearby Tilden Woods Stream Valley Park.

Because no roads lead to the cabin and there are no lights in the woods there, the Department of Parks has struggled to keep an eye on the one-room building, Gries said. Last year the county decided to tear it down.

“We had no intention of doing anything with the cabin when we bought the land,” Gries said.

When told of the demolition plans, Mary Armstrong offered to pay for it to be moved. Armstrong spent $25,500 to bring the cabin to its new location.

Now parks staff are gearing up to show off the cabin, located near the Locust Grove Nature Center at Cabin John Regional Park.

Jamie Kuhn, a member of the Park, Planning and Stewardship Division of the Department of Parks, said the cabin will host some information on Charles Armstrong’s life, his work and the historical relevance of the log cabin itself, which was built in a popular construction style in Depression-era America.

In the meantime, Mary Armstrong said she’s just pleased to know the cabin will survive.

“I just hope some people can appreciate it,” she said. “The way it’s held up.”

aruoff@gazette.net