LOGGING

From Page 15

Kelly said, there were hardly any deer in the area. Earlier settlers told them that “once they found a deer trail, they never, ever left it. That’s how badly they needed the deer meat.”

“Because there probably wasn’t much for underbrush or food for (the deer),” Justin added.

Walsh said his father, Chester, grew up in a log house by Little Dinner Lake, north of Two Inlets.

“I do remember him telling stories about how he would never live in a log house because he said when the wind blew at night, it wasn’t chinked real well,” said Walsh. “He said you could wake up and there would be snow right alongside your bed.”

It must not have done lasting harm. Both Chester and his brother, Harris Walsh, lived and worked into their 90s.

Kimball recalled Chester telling him he always wore buckskin mittens in the winter. “He said, in the fall you couldn’t hardly pick up a hammer with them,” said Kimball. “He said, by spring you could thread a needle with them.”

Technology and business

From the time the tall pines came down – late 1800s, early 1900s – the technology of timber harvesting also grew and changed.

Earl Hemmerich’s father, Roy, and Uncle Bill logged at Itasca State Park in the 1940s, when teams of horses and oxen, and sometimes steam engines, were used in earlier days to drag logs out of the woods, sometimes on sleighs running on ice-filled ruts.

“They would have a tank on a sleigh that would start out full of water, and the roads were rutted,” said Hemmerich. “The ruts were actually put in with a rutter for the logging sleighs to run on. Then, they would run water in those ruts, and (once frozen) it would take away the friction that the sleigh would have.”

Hemmerich said his grandfather, George, who immigrated from Germany to Arago Township, farmed during the summer and worked for a lumber company in the winter, operating the water tank sleigh. Logs were then loaded onto railroad cars or floated down rivers and chains of lakes, taking them to towns like Akeley and Park Rapids that had sawmills. Or perhaps farther.

“It’s amazing how far they would ship logs by the river,” said Hemmerich. “A log starting out from up here could even end up being down in Minneapolis or Winona, or even a mill or two in Iowa.”

His encyclopedic knowledge of lumberjacking equipment extends to all the chains, hooks and skids used to load the logs onto sleighs or wagons, techniques his family demonstrates annually at the Lake Itasca Region Pioneer Farmers Show. They also display vintage logging equipment in a museum on the showgrounds.

In 1946, he said, his father, uncle, and grandfather bought their first two-man chainsaw.

“It weighed 75 pounds or so, and you had an operator on one end with the engine, and the other end held the bar up,” said Hemmerich. “It wasn’t something you’d want to carry around in the deep snow. So, they went back to the mills, which would manufacture lumber and other building materials. (Contributed)

▼ Roy and Bill Hemmerich and their father, George, use their first two-man chainsaw in August 1946 on the west side of the road by Preacher’s Grover at Itasca State Park. (Contributed / Earl Hemmerich) crosscut saw for most of the cutting.”

Justin said an older lumberman told him that in those days, fuel was too expensive to use a chainsaw to limb trees, so they would use it to cut them down, then limb them with an ax.

“The old guys talked about that, when they were running with an ax or a Swede saw, it was quiet,” said Kelly. “They could visit as they were working. Then chainsaws came, and that kind of ruined that, for visiting as you worked. Maybe they got more done.”

Robin Fish can be reached at rfish@parkrapidsenterprise.com.