Vintage logging – trains

Each Saturday morning I review 10 vintage logging, forestry and saw milling photos. This week’s review of vintage logging are scenes are about trains and their role in the logging and forestry industry.

Click on the images to view larger pictures.

At first, logging companies cut trees along rivers and other bodies of water. They floated the logs downstream to the sawmill. After these areas were logged over, companies began using railroads to haul logs to a river or directly to the mill. The tracks could be moved as needed .

This photo shows a Shay locomotive, the train crew, and flatcars full of logs. Shay engines were especially designed for steep places and tight curves. The photo was taken sometime between 1903 and 1905 at North Bend, Washington. Mt. Si is in the background.

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Logging at Hall and Bishop, Gettysburg, log deck, loading rail cars.

Note accompanying the Minnihan photograph collection (from an unknown source): The contributor of this collection of photographs, Edward J. Minnihan, was born in 1914. His father, Michael E. ‘Bud’ Minnihan was born in 1883 near Sequim, WA. His parents were Michael E. and Rachel Minnihan. They moved to the Lyre River area, establishing a homestead shortly after 1883. Michael (Jr.) began working for the Hall and Bishop Logging Company in 1900, when he was 17 years old. His brothers and a half-brother Cliff Johnson, and his brother-in-law, Burt Mills, also worked for the Hall and Bishop Logging Company.

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Hall and Bishop locomotive #1, Gettysburg, Washington.

Note accompanying the Minnihan photograph collection (from an unknown source): The contributor of this collection of photographs, Edward J. Minnihan, was born in 1914. His father, Michael E. ‘Bud’ Minnihan was born in 1883 near Sequim, WA. His parents were Michael E. and Rachel Minnihan. They moved to the Lyre River area, establishing a homestead shortly after 1883. Michael (Jr.) began working for the Hall and Bishop Logging Company in 1900, when he was 17 years old. His brothers and a half-brother Cliff Johnson, and his brother-in-law, Burt Mills, also worked for the Hall and Bishop Logging Company.

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Locomotive and stacks of lumber at sawmill, probably in Grays Harbor County. Schafer Brothers Logging Company got its start in 1893 when brothers Peter, Albert and Hubert Schafer began logging on the family homestead 6 miles upstream from the mouth of the Satsop. They logged with oxen and horses for 20 years. The company’s first donkey engine was purchased from Washington Iron Works. Hubert went to work at the factory to learn how donkey engines were made and also to have all of his wages, except for living expenses, applied toward the cost of that first donkey engine. In 1913, they bought a 45-ton Heisler locomotive and laid tracks into the woods from Brady to begin their railroad logging operation. A shingle mill was purchased in Montesano in 1919, the first of many manufacturing plants the company would own throughout Grays Harbor County. At the peak of operation, the Schafers were running one of the largest logging, milling and shipping concerns in the lumber industry of the Pacific Northwest. Their properties and equipment at that time, not counting ships and tugs, included five sawmills in operation, served by six camps sending logs over 100 miles of rail. This required 18 locomotives, both geared and mainline types, and a total of 70 donkeys and 325 logging cars. To operate all of this equipment called for approximately 3000 employees. Simpson Timber Company purchased Schafer Brothers Logging Company in 1955.

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Rail load of logs at Oak Bay, locomotive Hall and Bishop #1. The contributor of this collection of photographs, Edward J. Minnihan, was born in 1914. His father, Michael E. ‘Bud’ Minnihan was born in 1883 near Sequim, WA. His parents were Michael E. and Rachel Minnihan. They moved to the Lyre River area, establishing a homestead shortly after 1883. Michael (Jr.) began working for the Hall and Bishop Logging Company in 1900, when he was 17 years old. His brothers and a half-brother Cliff Johnson, and his brother-in-law, Burt Mills, also worked for the Hall and Bishop Logging Company.

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Engine #7 and train of 20 cars of pine logs. Neches Valley Pine bound for Diboll, November 1907. Texas South-Eastern Railroad Engine 7 (a 1906 coal-burning Baldwin 44-ton Ten-wheeler) and crew pose with a pine log train on the mainline just west of Diboll. Engine 7 was one of eight locomotives then used by Texas South-Eastern Railroad in its Diboll operations.

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