26 



HARDWOOD RECORD 



■I'liK bk; sri.Asii iiam m:.\i:i.v ri imi'i.etkh 



THE STORY OF 



YELLOW POPLAR 



Illustrations from Photojrraphs by Editor Hardwood Record 



CHAPTER V 



111 telling the stury of the unique and suc- 

 cessful operations of the Yellow Poplar Lum- 

 ber Company of Coal Grove, Ohio, it is perti- 

 nent that a chapter be devoted to the physical 

 difficulties the company has encountered and 

 overcome in annually delivering to its saw 

 mills a great stock of poplar logs from re- 

 mote mountain fastnesses with the aid only 

 of streams that for many months in the year 

 are simply rock strewn gorges. These logs 

 are delivered distances of 130 to 170 miles. 



As has before been noted in these articles, 

 tributary to the lower reaches of the Big 

 Sandy River for more than 100 miles was 

 originally a splendid poplar timber area. 

 With the denudation of this region the re- 

 maining poplar stumpage was in extreme 

 eastern Kentucky and over the state line into 

 Virginia. This timber was remote from rail- 

 roads, and the only available means of trans 

 portation were these rough and rock strewn 

 mountain torrents which afforded floating 

 water for logs for a few days ' time in an 

 occasional season, and then for several years 

 contained so little water that it was impossi- 

 ble to utilize them in the natural state for 

 the delivery of logs. 



Early attempts to log the upper reaches 

 of the Big Sandy resulted in the delivery of 

 but a modicum of the logs put into the 

 stream year after year, with a tremendous 

 waste in timber from borers, rotten sap and 

 even rotted logs which has constituted a 

 heavy loss. 



The most recent logging operations of the 

 Yellow Poplar Lumber Company have been 

 in the mountains above the great canyon of 

 the Russell fork of the Big Sandy, where 

 it broke through the Cumberland mountains. 

 This great canyon is encompassed by cliffs 

 often 1,.500 feet in height, and the bed of the 

 stream is simply one mass of great rocks — 

 fallen sections of the cliffs. 



Getting logs through a five mile stretch 

 of a stream like this is an engineering prob- 

 lem that has baffled the lumbermen of the 

 Big Sandy region for many years, but it has 



remained for the Yellow Poplar Lumber 

 Company to overcome the difKculties and that 

 most successfully. 



In seven months this company erected the 

 largest splash dam for log driving purposes 

 that has ever been built. The dam is located 

 in Dickinson county, Virginia, on Russell 

 Fork, the main stem of the Big Sandy river, 

 just below the mouth of Bart's Lick and 

 Pound river, tributaries to this stream. 



The dam is anchored into solid rock at 

 both ends and at the base. Its extreme length 

 is 360 feet and it contains five "flues" or 

 flumes, each fortv feet wide. These flues 



are temporarily filled with an ingenious ar- 

 rangement of timbers, spa'rs and planking 

 to hold back the water and logs. 



The pictures with which this article is 

 illustrated show the dam in process of con- 

 struction, the false work of the dam in place, 

 with the head of water and logs above it, 

 and two views of the dam in process of 

 ' ' splashing. ' ' 



Primarily, the base for the dam was es- 

 tablished by blasting out solid rock in the 

 river bottom at a depth of five feet. This 

 base was then drilled and sections of 60- 

 |i(nind railroad steel set upon end to form the 



ii^ 



r V. v.uuii' #ir jimiiiiv M:r i«iii««iic««i 



=^^#^*^ 



THE DAM READY I<"OR A "Sl'LASir— I,flOKING FROM B'ELOW THE DAM. 



