Logging Tools

Weather: It rained much of the night Thursday. I tried working Friday on setting the base course of bricks for a short wall to stop the drift of dirt near by gate. I could get an shovel through the outer edge of the bank, but when I moved back about six inches I hit white ice. I know people somehow manage to dig in the winter, but I’m not up to using a pick axe.

Last useful rain: 2/14. Week’s low: 10 degrees F. Week’s high: 60 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, pink evening primroses, vinca, alfilerillo, snapdragon, cheat grass; garlic chives are sprouting under the leaf cover.

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer leaves

What’s red or purple: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples, leaves on a few golden spur columbines and purple asters

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: I found a small bird’s nest high in the catalpa. A neighbor’s cat used to lay on the boughs of the tree, and nothing touched the sand cherries below. That was some years ago, and last summer the fruit disappeared.

Weekly update: Thursday I had a local company cut down two trees, and remove deadwood and protruding branches from other trees. The head of the crew pointed to the branch to be cut, and the one logger cut it. Another picked up the trimmings and carried them to the fourth who put them through the chipper.

They used a chain saw for branches they could approach, and loppers on small branches. They often began with a horizontal chain saw mounted on a pole that could reach under the branches to get to dead wood. They also used it to reach branches that were beyond reach. The long handle eliminated the need to climb a ladder.

The tools had gasoline engines. In the hands of an idiot, the saws can create fire hazards with spilled fuel and sparks.

This equipment was very different from what was available a hundred years ago when loggers used steam-powered saws. Those saws burned wood for fuel, and were always a potential source for fire. The belts could maim.

Decades before that, farmers clearing land used axes and fire.

In Eaton County, Michigan, just north of where I grew up, families settled before the railroad was built. Unlike men along the Atlantic coast, who could sell the better trees they cut to sea-faring vessels, there was no market for the wood.

Bigelow Williams remembered:

"when a clearing was to be made, the chopper cut a row of trees so that their bodies fell in a straight line. Then similar rows were cut parallel to it and a few rods distant from each other, when the trees between these rows were cut so as to fall across the first rows, thus making immense hedges of fallen trees."

The cutting was done in mid-winter, and left to dry. By "August that they would burn quite readily, and wherever one tree fell across another it would almost inevitably burn off. When after a few days the fire went out and the coals cooled off, several men came with a yoke of cattle, a long chain and handspikes and piled the logs up, and where they had not been burned short enough to be handled, they were cut in two with an ax, and these log piles were then set on fire and burned."

The trees included black walnuts and ashes. Once transportation was available, these same trees that were used as fence posts, were dug out and sold to make cabinets and veneer for musical instruments.

Looking back, people lament the loss of good wood and shudder at the use of fire, but from 1840 looking forward there was only dense forest and no buyers. It was only after farms were established that railroads saw an economic opportunity in crossing the county and the wood could be sold.

Notes on photographs:
1. Birds nest high in the catalpa, 15 February 2019.

2. I had a cherry cut down that had not born fruit in ten years. The rootstock had shouldered aside the scion, and I suspected the pollen was sterile since few bees came around. All I could find out about the rootstock is that it was bred from "different Prunus forms." [2] When I looked at the stump, there was not a sign of the red heartwood one expects. 15 February 2019.

3. Six years ago I had a sour cherry cut down because the rootstock had taken over, produced inedible fruit, and gotten taller than the eaves. The stock most likely was Mazzard. Its stump looked like cherry wood. 25 March 2013.

End notes:
1. Wolcott Bigelow Williams. The Past and Present of Eaton County, Michigan. Lansing: Michigan Historical Publishing Association, 1906. 6–7.

2. H. Jänes and A. Pae. "Evaluation of Nine Sweet Cherry Clonal Rootstocks and One Seedling Rootstock." Agronomy Research 2:23–27:2004. 23.