Michigan loggers in 1890.

the guy on the right at the bottom is L.L.Johnson from charlotte michigan,, but what i find hard to believe is the weight them two horse are going to pull that is 50 to 60 thousand pounds if its white pine and its more if its red oak which i believe it is.. 98K if its red oak??/
 
leo, they would build rigging to do that, sometimes it was a wood frame that would allow them to roll them out onto the sleigh and other times they had a cable system rigged in trees to hoist with horses.. you can laod alot by just using the chains and pull them up the side.
 
leo, they would build rigging to do that, sometimes it was a wood frame that would allow them to roll them out onto the sleigh and other times they had a cable system rigged in trees to hoist with horses.. you can laod alot by just using the chains and pull them up the side.

A lot of the old logging operations that there were remnants of around where I grew up would build the landing around the biggest tree in the area. As I recall it it was called a "King Tree" (but I can't find a reference to that online so might be wrong). All of the rigging for loading would be done back to this tree and I think it was sometimes used as an anchor for skidding as well but am not as sure on that one. You could often find the stump of this in the middle of the clearing, often only it and a pile of sawdust was all that was left.

the guy on the right at the bottom is L.L.Johnson from charlotte michigan,, but what i find hard to believe is the weight them two horse are going to pull that is 50 to 60 thousand pounds if its white pine and its more if its red oak which i believe it is.. 98K if its red oak??/

Pulling it once its moving probably isn't so bad as long as there ain't no hills (down would be more exciting than up :D). It would be interesting to see how they managed to break it loose and get it started though. My dog I had trained to pull the toboggan when I was a kid could pull me and three bales of hay on the toboggan at speed once we got it rolling. I'd have to throw my shoulder into the back bale of hay when I yelled "Mush!" and then run like the dickens to get on board and stabilize the load before it got away.
 
I was thinking along the same lines as Peter. I'm betting it was a staged photo.

Or maybe a very early version of Photoshop. ( think they called it Phototent back then. :rofl:
 
A lot of the old logging operations that there were remnants of around where I grew up would build the landing around the biggest tree in the area. As I recall it it was called a "King Tree" (but I can't find a reference to that online so might be wrong). All of the rigging for loading would be done back to this tree and I think it was sometimes used as an anchor for skidding as well but am not as sure on that one. You could often find the stump of this in the middle of the clearing, often only it and a pile of sawdust was all that was left.

We call that Skyline Logging where I'm from. In really remote places they would use what we called Spar trees along the skyline to help keep the skyline in the sky, but at the landing area where the trees were sized and then cut it was almost always a metal tower that was used, it came as a self propelled unit, usually like this....

208dump.jpg


I'm sure back in the day they used actual trees, but that may have been back when they were using steam winches as well...? :D

And more info that you might want can be found >> HERE << :D
 
I was thinking along the same lines as Peter. I'm betting it was a staged photo.

Or maybe a very early version of Photoshop. ( think they called it Phototent back then. :rofl:

nope, not photoshopped, that pic was taken in Ewen Michigan and they were displayed at the worlds fair in the 1890's. That was my moms home town and they had a replica in town for many years, got rid if it some years back as it was rotting and they did not want kids to get hurt climbing it. Check out page 8 http://www.mcmillanlibrary.org/rosholt/wi-logging-book/wilogging/images/00000009.pdf
 
thanks tom, i didnt think they could pull that much with two horses and dad said that they iced the roads to make them pull easier. in one of the last pictures you can see one method for top loading.. you use chains to roll the log up the ramps to the top. used that method to load logs onto a trailer for hauling.. you can do it with one guy but two work better.
 
We call that Skyline Logging where I'm from. In really remote places they would use what we called Spar trees along the skyline to help keep the skyline in the sky, but at the landing area where the trees were sized and then cut it was almost always a metal tower that was used, it came as a self propelled unit, usually like this....

208dump.jpg


I'm sure back in the day they used actual trees, but that may have been back when they were using steam winches as well...? :D

And more info that you might want can be found >> HERE << :D

Yep same thing. I do realize that now that all the trees are just little toothpicks they have to use these new fangled devices :D, there probably isn't a tree big enough to use for this in most of the woods around here anymore :(. The landings I saw were mostly from the 30's through the 50's so some of them may well have used steam winches on the early side (or even horse drawn on the earliest ones) :D The later ones definitely used Diesel/gas as there were remnants of containers/drums in places as well. There were also in a few places some remnants of metal topped wooden tracking, I don't think? it was actually used as rail lines because the grade was all wrong but suspect it was mostly used in/near the landing as part of some sort of yarding scheme.

I was pleased to seem my favorite yarding system of the inverted skyline with a baloon on the list there. Some of my (older second) cousins were early adopters of that method on a few jobs.

Of course this is how we stacked hay as well - this isn't ours (I don't actually have any pictures of the old stacker, I know grandma does). It took some of the north country a while to go modern.
4680.jpg
 
ryan that stacker,, in the picture does that top part have long wooden pointed sticks like a giant comb? if so i have seen them and never knew there use.. i have dealt with loose hay but never seen those in use before.
 
nope, not photoshopped, that pic was taken in Ewen Michigan and they were displayed at the worlds fair in the 1890's. That was my moms home town and they had a replica in town for many years, got rid if it some years back as it was rotting and they did not want kids to get hurt climbing it. Check out page 8 http://www.mcmillanlibrary.org/rosholt/wi-logging-book/wilogging/images/00000009.pdf

Despite the fact that I find it hard to trust any library with "McMillan" in its name :rolleyes: :D the pics and captions do seem to confirm that these huge loads were done primarily for the photo opportunity they provided.
 
ryan that stacker,, in the picture does that top part have long wooden pointed sticks like a giant comb? if so i have seen them and never knew there use.. i have dealt with loose hay but never seen those in use before.

Yep thats the one. It actually has poles pointing up at right angles to eachother (the one set would be on the ground facing away from the stack and the other facing straight up, when it was raised the ones facing straight up would now face the stack and angle down a smidge and the ones that were on the ground would face straight up). The basic steps were we'd cut them with a side bar mower. Once the hay was heading on dry (but not to dry or it would bust up) we'd use a dump rake to pull the hay into rows. The rows were pulled sideways with the dump rake into "stooks" (piles). So far these tools are probably mostly ones you've seen or seen pictures of :D Most folks probably haven't seen a hay sweep though. You'd pick the stooks of hay up with the sweep. There are various designs but as best as I can recall the one we used looked a lot like this one with the horses off the side so's they didn't tromple the hay:
haymaking.jpg

When my folks were young they didn't use the overshot, but instead used an A frame type based off of derrick poles (maybe actually "gin poles" I guess). It was kinda like the setup in this video except a lot bigger and they used a sling instead of the hooks like this fellow uses (the sling was, I think, made out of poles so it would lay flat and the sweep could drop the hay on it - I know they used a sweep anyway). Dad still has the trip mechanism for the sling out in the barn somewhere (hopefully I still remember what it is and maybe even how it works when I go through all that stuff someday!!)


I think the rig this fellow is using to pickup the hay was probably originally for loading hay into a barn from a wagon. Pretty much positive it wasn't for stacking hay like we did, you'd be there all year with that little thing :rofl:

There were a few other stacker types (derrick poles - I think Dad's family used those as well at some point if I remember the stories right) and various sorts of slide stackers but I've never seen any of those in actual operation.
 
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