Logging History

Lumberjacking at the roots of Park Rapids history

BY ROBIN FISH Park Rapids Enterprise

It’s almost a joke to say the lumber industry lies at the roots of nonIndigenous settlement in the Park Rapids area. A pun, perhaps, on logs of yesteryear submerged in some of the area’s deepest lakes.

Today’s logging families acknowledge that their trade changed the Northwoods forever.

“The reason Park Rapids’ main street is

◀ Some of the people in this scene from Camp One, around 1915-20 near the Coon Lake Trail, are relatives of the Walsh family that continue to work in the logging and lumber industry around the Park Rapids Area.

(Photos contributed by Mike Walsh) so wide is so they can turn a horse with a load of lumber around on it,” said Kelly Kimball.

Kelly and his two brothers took over Kimball Logging from their father in 1978, and 45 years later he continues to run the business with his sons, Justin and Corey. Their family has been involved in the lumber industry since Kelly’s grandparents moved into the area from Wisconsin.

Justin noted that many local trails now used for riding ATVs and snowmobiles were first built as logging roads. “We still take care of them,” he said. “When we work on them, we don’t leave them in bad shape.”

“After the big timber was cut and a lot of the big companies, like Weyerhaeuser and Red River Lumber in Akeley moved west, some of the little loggers, like sawmills like my grandpa, they would go get these deadheads, they call them,” said Kelly. “They’re on the bottom of lakes, and they could fish them out of there somehow. So they actually kept in business doing that for a few more years.”

Even some of the resorts in the area can trace their lineage to the logging industry. According to Mike Walsh, who runs C&M Walsh Logging with his son, Dylan, the Boulder Beach Resort on Potato Lake was built on the site of a logging camp, even preserving the camp’s main lodge. “So there’s a little bit of history there, right at the mouth of the river that goes into Fish Hook,” he said.

Walsh added that there are still remnants of the pylons that used to hold logs in the wintertime, waiting to be floated downstream in the spring. “Today, they’ve been cut off, but you can see them,” he said. “They’re four or five feet below the water’s surface.”

Change in the forest

Walsh’s grandmother was the sister of Kelly Kimball’s grandfather. He also traces his lineage back to multiple generations of lumbermen.

After the first logging boom cleared the area of old-growth white pine and Norway pine, he said, loggers burned whatever was left, and what grew back was mostly aspen.

This new forest needs more management, Justin said, with aspens living only 60-70 years, compared to Norway pines that can live 200 years. On the other hand, he said, “It is nice to see, when we harvest the aspen, drive past it a year later and the trees are already up to six, eight feet tall the next summer.”

Efforts have been made to protect or restore the pine forest biome, the Kimballs noted – particularly at Itasca State Park, though the white pines struggle against disease and deer.

In the early days of logging the area,

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