Vintage logging – log yard

Each Saturday morning I review 10 vintage logging, forestry and saw milling photos. This week’s review of vintage photos takes a look at the log yards and the men who worked them.

Be sure to click on each picture to see the larger images.

In 1907, about 400 people lived in North Bend, Washington. Most were employed in logging or lumber milling. The lumber was shipped to market over a branch line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The local shingle mill made most of the wooden pipe used in Seattle’s Cedar River water supply line .
This photographic postcard, probably made between 1907 and 1912, shows a boomman standing on a huge log at the edge of the North Bend Lumber Company’s log pond. He uses his long pole to sort logs in the pond and direct them towards the sawmill.

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Cold deck and logging crew.

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Drake’s Logging Camp in 1904. Donated by Major De Pingre.

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Sailing ships at Port Blakely Mill. Log pond in foreground.

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Crew and guests with electric transfer log loader, skeleton railroad cars, and truck. 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. The companies first donkey engine was purchased from Washington Iron Works. Hurbert 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 usher in their railroad logging era. A shingle mill was purchased in Montesano in 1919, the first of many manufacturing plants the company would own through Grays Harbor County. Simpson Timber Company purchased Schafer Brothers Logging Company in 1955.

The electric log transfer was operated by power generated from the Schafer Brothers turbine at Spoon Creek Falls. It was, in effect, an overhead crane. A truck of logs drove under the crane; a sling picked up the entire load, package style, and swung it over a logging flatcar spotted next to the truck and dropped it.

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Photograph shows Harry Franklin Zink at a millpond in Susanville, CA.
Rights Information: Feb 28 2019 Special permission granted by the owning institution, California State University, Chico, CA, US, to WoodchuckCanuck.com, for use of this image for historical logging special collection review. Source: cdlib.org

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1916 East half Granville Island before filling.

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Photograph shows the Stirling City Mill pond, part of the Sierra Lumber Company. Butte County, California.
Rights Information: Feb 28 2019 Special permission granted by the owning institution, California State University, Chico, CA, US, to WoodchuckCanuck.com, for use of this image for historical logging special collection review. Source: cdlib.org

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