Vintage Logging – Log rafts
Each Saturday morning I review 10 vintage logging, forestry and saw milling photos. This week’s review of vintage logging is about log rafts.
1800s Ottawa River timber trade.
The Ottawa River was the means of transporting logs to Quebec, using timber rafting. Sticks were trapped by a boom at the mouth of the tributary to be assembled into cribs, each crib consisting of 30 or more sticks of timber. Then the cribs, up to 100 of them, were joined together into a raft that served as the riverman’s home for the month-long journey downriver to Quebec. The crew lived in bunk houses right on the raft, and one of the cribs contained the cookery. Note the original Canadian Parliment Buildings in the background. As a historical note, it burned down in 1916. At 8:37 p.m. on February 3, 1916, while the House of Commons is sitting, a fire starts in the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings. A gentleman in the Reading Room notices something burning and calls it to the attention of a clerk, but it is already too late.
1910 A tugboat towing a Davis raft of logs.
1918 Tugboat and sailboat near log boom.
1938 Tugboat “Hyak” and log boom.
1944 Davis Raft at Pacific Mills.
1944 Davis Raft at Pacific Mills.
1945 Building a raft for Pacific Mills on the Queen Charlotte Islands.
1945 Building a raft for Pacific Mills on the Queen Charlotte Islands.
1945 Davis Raft making off the Queen Charlotte Islands.
