THE DEVELOPMENT OF LOGGING OPERATIONS 



BY HU MAXWELL 



CUTTING sawlogs and conveying them to mills to 

 be converted into lumber has been a business since 

 soon after the Pilgrim Fathers moored their bark 

 on the New England coast. America was more than a 

 century ahead of England in sawmill building, for in the 

 old country labor associations, guilds, and the laborers 

 individually, were hostile to mills that made lumber be- 

 cause it was feared that they would deprive pit sawyers 

 (hand sawyers) of their means of livelihood, and that 

 was why in England they went ahead sawing lumber by 

 hand a full century after the Americans resorted to the 



our early years this saw was not as important, relatively, 

 in felling trees and bucking logs as it is now. Most of 

 the work was done with axes ; yet saws were used to 

 some extent for that work. It was not unusual, within 

 the memory of men still living, for trees to be converted 

 into sawlogs with axes, the chopper squaring both ends 

 of the log and in the process wasting about a foot of each 

 log's length. The axman stood on the log and chopped 

 the trunk off. He made both sides of the notch square 

 as he proceeded, thus really cutting the trunk off twice 

 for each log, which was not only a waste of time but a 

 waste of wood. It was necessary to have the ends 

 of the # log square in order to place it on the 

 old water mill's carriage. The modern mill 



The kinked rail, the job lot of ties, and the 

 sharp curves indicate that this tapline road is 

 meant to be only temporary; yet such roads are 

 sometimes improved and become permanent trans- 

 portation lints. This is a region of mixed hard- 

 woods and softwoods of excellent grades, to which 

 . the piles of logs on the right of way bear evidence. 

 And now we see a logging road temporarily out 

 of commission, and it may continue so for weeks 

 until the Mississippi's overflow subsides. 



use of water power mills or, in rare 

 cases, of mills driven by the wind. 



But whether the sawing was done 

 by pit sawyers or by power mills, the first step in con- 

 verting a tree into lumber was to crosscut it into logs 

 and convey the logs to the place where the lumber was to 

 be made. The logging business has gone steadily on in 

 America during two or three centuries, with constant 

 development of methods to keep pace with the growth 

 of other industries. The beginnings were on a small 

 scale everywhere, but large enough to meet the demand 

 for lumber. Two men with a span of horses or a yoke 

 of oxen could cut and haul enough logs to supply the 

 little mill on the frontier where the customers were all 

 found within a radius of four or five miles. It has been 

 a far cry from that day to this, though the growth was 

 gradual and each improvement served as a stepping 

 stone to something still better. 



The crosscut saw is as old as Egypt's civilization, but 

 the Americans took the prototype and developed it. In 



In this region lumbermen expect such interruptions 

 to their work and lay their plans accordingly. In 

 this last picture we see a splash dam, which will 

 impound the water flowing in the channel and loose 

 it at intervals to carry logs on their way. 



AND THE FLOODS DESCENDED 



can handle a log with unsquared ends. 



The employment of a saw in crosscutting was the first 

 important conservation step in logging; for it saved 

 from three to six feet of a tree's length. In view of this, 

 it is surprising that saws were so slow in taking the place 

 of axes in felling trees and bucking logs ; but it is well 

 known that the idea of economy in manufacturing and 

 using wood was seldom present in the years when forests 

 were supposed to be exhaustless. The possibility of sav- 

 ing four or five feet of the trunk of each tree as it was 

 cut into sawlogs made a weak appeal to most timber 

 owners until very recent times. The log cutter, like the 

 proverbial workman, "was known 'by his chips," and ten 

 bushels of chips, where two gallons of sawdust would 

 have sufficed, proved, in his opinion, that he was a good 

 workman. 



A letter written from Philadelphia by Thomas Paschett 

 in 1683 contains a quaint, short account of logging with 



