The Democratic advocate. [volume] (Westminster, Md.) 1865-1972, 1883-09-01
Our 0lio.
A GREAT LUMBER REGION.


Post correspondent, the signs of the pre-
vailing industry become apparent. The
streams are clogged with old slabs, Drowned
and rotting logs, and chaotic masses of
wooden debris from the size of match up
to the huge sawn beam which in some an
cient food has escaped its bonds. In the
fields still remain the tree stumps or piles
of sawdust dozen feet high, marking the
old site of sawmill, now removed because
the material that fed it has been cut away.
But all these initial symptoms of the lum-
Der region are eclipsed and forgotten when
the Saginaw river is reached, and with it
the busy centre of the industry. For six
teen miles, down to Bay City, near Lake
Huron, the stream flows between wooden
strands. The eye strains itself in vain to
see beyond the lumber horizon that stretches
east and west. The yellow waters, perhaps
two hundred feet wide, pass first between
continuous booms, each enclosing its army
of giant logs. These booms reach far above
Saginaw, and if we include tributaries of
the river and count both sides, make up
reach of log posts seventy miles long.
Next to the logs and on the bank proper
rise, most impressive of all, the tracts of
sawn lumber. Pile on pile they rise on
either side for sixteen miles up and down
the stream, covering acre after acre, until
the wooden monotony becomes oppressive.
Now and then the wooden strand becomes
thinner only to rise again to more imposing
heighth and width around new cluster of
mills. These mills, often of great proper
tions, spring from their lumber heaps as
giant of fairy story looms amid the disin-
tegrated bones of his victims. Their tall
iron chimneys belch black smoke, the rat
ting saws cut the air with their distant
rasp, and the sense of industrial activeness
is filled out by the hives of workmen,
swarming over the lumber hills and loading
them, by slow but steady toll, into barges,
whose hulls rival the capacity of Cunar-
der.
Along this stretch of sixteen miles of
the Saginaw river there are cut annually a
billion feet of lumber, and last year the
figures went fifty millions higher than that
amount. Since to most readers these fig
ures are vague immensity of numbers,
let us try to simplify them by an illustra-
ton. The Saginaw mills turn out each
year so much lumber, large and small, that
if it were all cut in inch thick boards, each
of them one foot wide, and then these
boards were placed end to end, they would
reach about 100000 miles, or four times
around our planet. The product, to put
the illustration a little differently, would
supply lumber enough for fence four times
around the world, made of solid wooden
posts, with double row of boards, each
six inches wide.
Up the Saginaw, in wild region, reached
either by the river or its tributaries, the
great pine saw log, often three feet in di-
ameter, has its birth. Pine forests, now
rapidly thinning out, once covered several
thousand square miles around the headwa-
ters. Entering that lumber region in the
late autumn, the lumbermen establish
camps, round which the whole winter long
the axes resound, the tall trunks fall, and
in sections are rolled to the adjacent
streams for the spring floods to bear away
Floating down to the main river, the "boom
men" pick out each others logs, as identi-
fed by the brand, and gather them inside
of the booms, which may be curtly de-
scribed as long tree trunks chained together
at the ends, often inclosing smooth water
surface of several acres. The coves of the
Saginaw-called locally bayous, term
borrowed from the lower Mississippi
are specially adapted for the gathering and
organization of these log armies. The
military metaphor, indeed, has peculiar fit
ness here, for the logs are mustered side by
side in companies, held together by a rope
fastened to each log by device not unlike
the domestic clothespin. As the logs down
stream are worked up by the tireless mills,
these upper booms are drawn upon for
more, until the freezing river finds them
quite empty, and another winter comes on
to yield its fresh supply.
But the saw logs story becomes most
dramatic as it nears the mill, and, loosed
from the restraining rope, is steered into
the glade of open water that leads up to the
wooden slide. Enter now the great lumber
mill, and we shall be in at the saw logs
death. Down the slide on wooden rail
road runs heavy track, fitted with two
cross lines of heavy iron teeth. With
plunge it dashes below the water, still
holding its place on the rails. Then three
giant logs are foated above it. At signal
the steam is let on, the machinery reversed,
the strong chain holding the truck tightens,
and the truck itself begins to ascend. The
sharp teeth catch the logs, which in trice
are lifted dripping from the water, whisked
up like twigs hundred feet to the mill,
and rolled off opposite the first set of saws.
These saws are two in number; one set be-
low is of the buzz variety, perhaps six feet
in diameter, and cutting therefore through
a three-foot log; but as this semi-diameter
is often insufficient for big log, a second
and smaller buzz, placed above and in front
of the first, cuts the slice, which otherwise
might still hold fast the slab. One of the
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