26 



HARDWOOD RECORD 



-MAKIXi; 11' STUINGS AM) RAFTS OF YELLOW POPLAR IN Ui'PEI! BIG SANDY. 



THE STORY OF 



YELLOW POPLAR 



Illustrations from Photographs by Editor Heriwood Record 



Chapter VII 



The great splash dam of the Yellow Poplar Lumber Company, at 

 the head of the breaks of the Big Sandy in Dickinson county, Vir- 

 ginia, has fulfilled the purpose for which it was erected. Today the 

 Yellow Poplar Lumber Company has more than one-fourth of its 

 40,000,000 feet of logs, cut in the Virginia mountains last year, de- 

 livered at its log harbor at Coal Grove, Ohio. The remaining 30,000,- 

 000 feet is in floating water in the Big Sandy river in the form of 

 rafts ready to be dispatched down the river as the logs are required 

 at the Coal Grove mill. 



Leon Isaacson, the head of this great yellow poplar house, has 

 removed his general camp headquarters to Vicey P. O., Dickinson 

 county, Va., some six miles from their location last year, and is now 

 engaged in building twenty miles of main tramroad and twenty 

 miles of laterals to clean up another principality of poplar growth 

 which will be delivered at Kussell fork, five miles above the main 

 dumping ground employed last year. This year '.s operations will 

 include cutting the poplar from 15.000 to 18,000 additional acres of 

 mountain land, and the construction of a secondary splash dam five 

 miles above the big concrete dam built last year just above the 

 breaks. This herculean task scheduled for accomplishment this year 

 will be a duplicate of the work the Yellow Poplar Lumber Company 

 did during the year 1909. The big sticks of yellow poplar from this 

 operation will be splashed with the upper dam down to the poud 

 above the big concrete dam and then splashed through the breaks 

 of the Big Sandy. It has been demonstrated that it takes just forty- 

 five minutes to drive logs from the big concrete splash dam through 

 the ten miles of breaks and the upper reaches of Kussell fork tu 



floating water in the Big Sandy river, thus a current of twelve 

 and a half miles an hour is induced by the tremendous tide. 



The first picture with which this article is illustrated shows the 

 putting together of the logs that have been caught as they floated 

 about loose in the upper stream in the form of great 

 "strings." These strings are again grouped in the form of raft.s 

 and in this way are floated down the Big Sandy to Catlettsburg, 

 where the rafts are grouped together into fleets, and then towed 

 across and down the Ohio to the log harbor of the Yellow Poplar 

 Lumber Company at Coal Grove, Ohio. The state law of Kentucky 

 provides that the log catchers get 25 cents per stick for catching 

 logs and putting them in the form of strings ready for the raftsman. 

 The rafting is done by contract. 



The second picture shows part of one of the large fleets of logs 

 as it lies in the Ohio river above the company's big mills at Coal 

 Grove. Here the rafts are gradually broken up and the logs are 

 dispatched up the log-slide to the mill. 



At the present time the Yellow Poplar Lumber Company is operat- 

 ing its double band mill thirteen hours and is daily producing 130,000 

 feet of yellow poplar. The demand for this company's product is 

 so great that it is succeeding in but gradually accumulating its usual 

 large stock. In the case of poplar panel, which it produces for the 

 automobile trade to the extent of a full carload daily, a considerable 

 portion is being shipped green from the saw. 



By the foresight of its principals, the Yellow Poplar Lumber 

 Company has achieved the distinction of being the only large pro- 

 ducer of yellow poplar in the country that has a stock of logs of any 

 size (iM hand, and thus it will be able to realize remarkablv hand- 



