Historic Hood River
“Felling a Forest Giant, Oregon”
Notes
This is a good companion to last week’s posts about logging at the Stanley Smith Lumber Company Camp 3. You can see how they used a springboard and crosscut saw to bring down this tree with no power tools. The stereocard gives some of the details:
The state of Oregon is noted for its fine forests. It contains one-sixth of the standing timber of the United States. Its forested area in 1914 was about 16,000,000 acres. These forests are made up of magnificent trees of spruce, hemlock, pine, cedar, and redwood. The Douglas fir is the most common and is the greatest producer of lumber. In 19t6 the state produced more than 98,000,000 board feet of lumber.
You are shown here how one of these forests looks. It does not suggest to you, however, the great height of the trees. These are some. times 300 feet high. The timbers from some of the Douglas firs are 11o feet in length.
Lumbering is carried on in these forested sections on an extensive scale. Great sawmills are built, usually beside a large stream. This stream may furnish water power, but it is chiefly valuable in carrying the logs to the mill and in shipping the lumber away. In many places small railroads have been constructed deep into the woods to carry the logs to mills.
One of the most interesting processes in lumbering is here seen. This is the felling of one of the forest giants. First of all the tree is
“girdled” a few feet from its base. That is, the bark is removed so that it will not catch in the teeth of the cross-cut saw. The lumbermen then build broad platforms such as you see, so they can reach the girdled strip. Back and forth they pull the saw, one or two men-holding either handle.The exciting moment is when the saw has all but severed the huge trunk. The branches tremble, the uncut portions of the trunk snap, and the tree slowly begins to fall. The workmen remove the saw, and run some distance away. There is a swishing in the air, and then a loud crash. Another monarch of the woods has fallen!
Copyright by The Keystone View Company.
Thorn
I always wonder what the forests used to look like.
Ponder this. The Douglas Fir can live to be over a 1000 years old–so, Jesus was two Douglas Firs ago. And it’s possibly the tallest living thing on Earth, as the legendary Nooksack Giant suggests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nooksack_Giant
Take that piddly 380ft “Hyperion” Sequoia. .
kmb
Great picture and write-up. I wonder if standing on the springboards, which must have flexed, made the sawing easier or more difficult.
Also wonder if back in these days with two-man manual saws if they did a “wedge” cut like they do today with power chain saws, to get the tree to fall in the desired direction.
Arthur Babitz
kmb, I understand the springboards were designed to flex and the notches were shaped so the sawyer could jump and kick the board to change its angle.