HARDWOOD RECORD 



road building commenced. At the end of November the company 

 had ten million feet of splendid poplar dropped into the river along 

 the "breaks," and thirty million feet in one immense log dump 

 above the ' ' breaks. ' ' Contemporaneous with this work it com- 

 menced the construction of an immense splash dam, heretofore de- 

 scribed in Habdavood Record, below the big log dump. This splash 

 dam is now in successful operation and a large portion of the forty 

 million foot log crop for 1910 is now splashed either through the 

 "breaks" to rafting water or is far enough advanced to show that 

 the company is going to have the biggest crop of poplar logs ever 

 manufactured by any one concern in a single year in the history of 

 the trade. 



The picture at the head of this article shows one of the wildest 

 places in the ' ' breaks ' ' of the river. The cliff at the right rises to 

 a height of about fifteen hundred feet and the one at the bend of the 

 river in the distance is not of much less altitude. At the left, 

 utilizing a small cove, a log road was constructed and the great poplar 

 sticks are seen rolled down the side of the bank and partially into 

 the river bottom from the rollway. The area pictured is so great 

 that the big poplar timbers look like matches, but they will average 

 more than seven hundred and fifty feet to the stick. 



The picture on the right-hand page is typical of the Yellow Poplar 

 Lumber Company's operations and shows the cutting of the kerf of 

 the big tree previous to felling it with the cross-cut saw. 



The final picture shows a splendid poplar tree that has been 

 felled and cut to the lengths in which it is transported to the river. 



In the next chapter of this storj' will be analyzed the engineering 

 difficulties and the tremendous cost involved in getting poplar timber 

 out of as rough and forbidding a country as this to the company's 

 eawmilling point in the mouth of the Big Sandy. To the lumberman 

 not familiar with rough country operations it would be appalling 

 both in cost and the tremendous labor involved. 



The average user of poplar lumber seems to be of the impression 

 just now that poplar is getting ' ' pretty high. ' ' Before the buyer has 

 finished reading this series of articles covering the immense cost in- 

 volved in securing this timber from the remote and only remaining re- 

 gions where it now exists, he will be surprised that the price of the wood 

 still remains as low as it does. White pine lumber of not nearly so large 

 sizes as are obtainable in poplar commands a much higher price and 

 has for years. Ordinary white pine ship decking, which is only 

 a three-faced material, three by four inches in size, is worth about 

 $1S0 per thousand at the Atlantic seaboard today. Surely poplar 

 lumber of the texture and width in which it is supplied, in comparison 

 to white pine, is still a very low-priced commodity. 



Getting out i:ioplar logs from timber regions like this is "rush-and- 

 hurry-up" work from start to finish. After the swamping for the 

 railroad is made it has to be built with the crude materials at hand. 

 Steel rails are not employed because the railroad haul and teaming 

 across the mountains of the steel rails alone would figure more than 

 the entire cost of building wooden tramroads, which last long enough 

 to clean the timber from the desired territoiy. 



During the last year this company has taken poplar from over 

 fifteen thousand acres, and has started the work veritably from the 

 ground up. The several locomotives employed were dismantled and 

 taken apart at the end of the railroad and hauled in sections over 

 the two mountain ridges referred to. Hundreds of teams have been 

 at work ever since the first of last March until a recent date in 

 hauling machinery, supplies, concrete, dynamite and other things 

 necessary to keep the woi'k going. 



It is no city-desk job for the laborers in lumber operations in 

 Dickecson county. Every man is on the job at four o'clock in the 

 morning (eastern time), and after the work is well started the log 

 trains are never stopped during the twenty-four hours, and even 

 Sunday is not entirely respected. This means rising at three o'clock. 

 High wages of necessity have to be paid, but every man on the joli 

 is a worker and is just as enthusiastic in getting the monumental 

 task accomplished as are the principals of the concern themselves. 



In all the writer's woods experience he never has seen such fast 

 work accomplished in logging as has been done at the Yellow Poplar 

 Lumber Company's operations during the year 1909 and thus far 

 during 1910. 



l.TTTINi; THE KERF 



.\ nii; Mii.T.iPW rnri..\i; felled .\ni( cit to length 



