12 HISTORY OF LUMBER INDUSTRY IN NEW YORK. 



PIT-SAWING. 



Pit-sawing- was done by two men with a long- saw that had cross 

 handles on each end. A stick of timber, hewed square, was placed over 

 a pit, or elevated on trestles. One man stood on top of it and pulled 

 the saw up, and one man stood in the pit below to pull the saw down. 

 (PI. I.) The workman on top, who guided the saw along- the chalk line, 

 and who was supposedly the better man, was called the top-sawyer. 

 The one below was called the pit-man. When sawmills were first sub- 

 stituted in this work the saw was held taut on the upward stroke by a 

 spring pole overhead, and was worked up and down by a wooden beam 

 attached to a crank on the mill wheel. This wooden beam was called the 

 pitman, and is still known by that name in every sawmill throughout 

 the country. Pit-sawing or whip-sawing, as it is often called, was not 

 entirely abandoned on the introduction of sawmills. This old method 

 was still useful in sawing long stuff, because in many mills the log- 

 carriage was not long enough to saw planks of the desired length. As 

 late as 1860, at the gang-mills near Painted Post, Steuben County, the 

 writer saw a large, square stick of timber being sawed in this fashion 

 into long planks for the sides of a canal boat. 



THE FIRST SAWMILLS. 



John Verrazzano and Hendrick Hudson made their famous discov- 

 eries and sailed awa}^ without leaving a man behind to occupy the newly 

 found territory. No settlement was made by white men, no house 

 erected, until 1614. Just when the labor of the settlers first took 

 the form which we now call lumbering it is impossible to say, but in 

 1623, nine years after the first house was built at New Amsterdam, 

 three sawmills were erected there by the Dutch West India Company; 

 and, with their erection, commences the history of lumbering in the 

 State of New York. 



The machinery for these mills, which was shipped from Holland, 

 was constructed to run by water-power or by windmill. One of them 

 was built on Governors Island, and was probably operated by wind- 

 power; another, which stood on Sawmill Creek, a tributary of the 

 East River, may have used a water-wheel. In 1639 the mill on Gov- 

 ernors Island was leased at an annual rental of 500 merchantable boards, 

 half oak and half pine. 



About the same time, perhaps a little earlier, some sawmills were 

 built at Fort Orange (Albany) or in its immediate vicinity. Andries 

 Corstiaensen, a master millwright, with two sawyers, was sent there 

 from Holland in 1630. Among the settlers at Rensselaerwyck (Troy), 

 in 1630, were Lawrens Lawrenssen and Barent Tomassen, sawvers. a 



"History of Albany County, by George R. Howell. New York: W. W. Munsell 

 & Co. 1886. 



