A s-era camp offered less than 20 square feet of sleeping space for the lumbermen. None of the bunks had mattresses and few had pillows. The bunks were full of hay or straw and men could add more if needed - and if they could find it. Men had access to blankets spreads , but no sheets. The spreads were supposed to be washed once a year - if you can call being dunked into hot soapy water a wash - but sometimes the annual washing was forgotten. Modern logging camps have usual household amenities with nice bunkhouses and real mattresses.
One of the most notable modern camps is Comstock Camp in Northern Maine. Robert E. Pike wrote in Tall Trees, Rough Men that woodmen would not work well unless they were well fed, so camp cooks carried a lot of weight and respect - if they were good.
Well-respected cooks could threaten to leave the camp if they felt they were being treated unfairly. A camp with no cook or a bad cook would have a hard time surviving the season. Ingredients were severely limited because there was no refrigeration. Some staples of every Maine logging camp were: salted meats, salted or canned fish, pork and beans, molasses, gingerbread, and tea.
Hardly a nutritious diet. As camps grew larger, cooks gained more assistants, called cookees. Cookees had to help clean, build fires, and deliver meals to loggers who were too far from the camp to return for the noon day meal. During the beginning of the season, lumbermen established their seats for the evening meal. If new men came to the camp they would have to wait until every man was seated before he could choose his official seat. Around , visitors to logging camps included peddlers or people from mountain villages on some sort of business.
Occasionally a priest or missionary would come on Sunday to hold a service. When logging companies were established, many men came down from Canada to work for a season. The men were usually very young and seldom worked for more than two or three seasons.
After a couple of seasons, their farms would be paid off and they could work on the farm year round. Around , lumbermen made between 17 and 30 dollars a month depending on their individual ability and work performed. Scots and Irish men also made up a large majority of lumbermen. Loggers often worked from sunup to sundown, either cutting timber or driving logs down river. The work has always been dangerous. The men had to constantly be aware of their surroundings to avoid being smashed by a falling tree or falling off a log into an icy, raging river.
Many river drivers did not know how to swim. Luckily, caulk boots spiked helped the river drivers balance. Dynamite and special tools were used to break up log jams along the river until log drives were banned in the s. Literature from the early 20th century romanticizes lumbermen and log drivers. Fanny Hardy Eckstorm, wrote a beautiful description of log drivers breaking up log jams along the Penobscot River in her book, The Penobscot Man. William S. A scaler is someone who measured standing timber, logs, and sawn lumber at the mills.
They were also known as surveyors in the early 19th century. The position of the scaler grew as lumber cooperatives grew and the forest industry became more complex. In , Massachusetts law required each town to annually elect a scaler known then as a surveyor to grade and measure products. All products had to be measured before sale. When logging cooperatives were established, the number of scaling jobs increased, including both elected surveyors and private scalers. As pine tree forests were thinned out, the need for accurate measurements increased.
In , a Maine law authorized fees for scalers. This, unfortunately, led to quite a bit of lying from scalers, who wanted to make more money. Up until the s, lumberjacks felled trees with axes.
The custom of using the cross-cut or "misery whip" saw began in Pennsylvania and spread from there. The unhappy name for this tool comes from the difficulty and frustration of using a saw that they could not keep sharp enough. Misery whips came in a variety of sizes, depending on the tree to be cut down.
The saws ranged from the one-man saw which could be as short as three feet to the two-man saw which could be as long as 16 feet. Felling saws were the flexible and relatively light saws lumberjacks used for cutting the trees down. The timber harvested each year provides raw materials our nation needs to create the goods and services consumers all over want and need.
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By Michigan was producing more lumber than any other state, a distinction it continued to hold for 30 years. During that time loggers penetrated and settled the interiors of both peninsulas and moved away from the rivers in search of timber. Lumbermen became less selective as the years passed, cutting inferior quality white pine and logging other kinds of trees in order to meet a continuing demand for wood.
Lumbering grew dramatically for three reasons. First, Treaties with Ojibwe and other tribes made the timber lands available. Second, the agricultural frontier was advancing westward into the treeless prairies, as waves of settlers arrived in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska.
Finding rich soil but few building materials, the settlers looked to the northwoods timber for their lumber. Third, and most important, Michigan had an extensive network of waterways that flowed from the woods to the Great Lakes, from which the logs and lumber could be shipped just about anywhere. The Saginaw, Au Sable, Manistee, Escanaba, Muskegon, Thunder Bay and Menominee rivers and their tributaries provided transportation for many of the harvested logs to mills and markets, and provided power for the mills.
Numerous sloughs, oxbows, lakes, and bays provided ideal holdings areas for cut timber waiting to be milled and for building "log booms" for sorting and storage. Logging and milling had begun in earnest between and In general, the pine lands and the central, southern, and eastern areas were logged first and most completely, and were then subject to damaging fires which followed. These were the drier sites which had most pine to begin with, and were so situated and continuous as to be in the paths of many fires which raced from west to east with the prevailing winds.
These were also the areas in which ill-advised agricultural efforts, encouraged by land speculators, stimulated land clearing by early settlers. Patches of timber of varying size, protected on the west by either open water or wet swamps, or, to a lesser extent, hardwood sites, escaped some of the fires which swept around them, but sooner or later many of these burned too.
Source: Unknown High Plains logging Some of the largest and best pine stands in Michigan were in the area known as the "High Plains" the High Plains are the high, sandy areas near Grayling and Gaylord. In the 's "land lookers" were busy in the High Plains area locating and filing land claims on choice timber acreage.
There were still no settlements in the pine country except along the lake shore but the Land Office Survey had been through the country and had marked the township and section lines. Occasionally two parties of "lookers" would meet in choice timber country and a spirited race would follow, the destination being the Land Office at Ionia, two hundred miles south.
A lively speculation in timber lands grew up, although most of these were beyond the reach of lumbering for the time being. In addition these early lands were not average, some of those on the western side of the High Plains yielded almost 30, board feet per acre.
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