# logging archaeololgy



## paccity (Feb 28, 2011)

was up hiking in a old ceadar cut , lotts of old stumps with springboard knotches. and found a old misery whip, 6' long pretty rusty and a little buckle to it. was kinda amazed that it hadn't compleatly rusted away after this long. i guess 60-70+ years. what has anybody else found in the woods as far as old logging hand tool's? i've found plenty of donkys, r&r iron and such, but not hand tools. it will go up on the shop wall.


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## madhatte (Feb 28, 2011)

I've got a small collection, too. I have a section of rusty misery whip about 8 inches long, an old oil can lid marked "Standard Oil Company, Los Angeles" (which means it predates the monopoly bust of 1911), several old bottles, some glass and ceramic insulators, and a bunch of militaria dating to the 40's.


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## coastalfaller (Feb 28, 2011)

paccity said:


> was up hiking in a old ceadar cut , lotts of old stumps with springboard knotches. and found a old misery whip, 6' long pretty rusty and a little buckle to it. was kinda amazed that it hadn't compleatly rusted away after this long. i guess 60-70+ years. what has anybody else found in the woods as far as old logging hand tool's? i've found plenty of donkys, r&r iron and such, but not hand tools. it will go up on the shop wall.


 
Awesome find! I love tramping around through the second growth, I always keep an eye open for stuff. I've come across a couple old donkeys too. Walked through and old camp once, second growth coming up all through it. Found a pile of leather cork boots, ones on the bottom were preserved pretty good. Was like as they were all leaving they just tossed them into a pile on their way to the dock. Old trucks too, solid rubber tires, wooden reaches, second growth coming up through the cabs. Pretty cool stuff to see. My bullbucker found an old misery whip, oil bottle with the hook and an axe once leaning against an old stump. Looked around for the wedge bag, but couldn't find it. Happy hunting!


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## outdoorsman0490 (Feb 28, 2011)

You guys are lucky, the only thing I ever found walking around my property in northwest Mass. was an old empty sardine can left in the hollow of an old trunk by the loggers of a long time ago.


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## madhatte (Feb 28, 2011)

I know where a couple of trestles from the steam era are slowly going back to the ground in Capitol Forest. There's a badly-decayed camp (also totally looted) near one of them.


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## paccity (Feb 28, 2011)

i know where a lott of the old camps are around here, what i need to get is a metal detector and start going over some .


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## madhatte (Feb 28, 2011)

Hrmm, that's a good idea.


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## slowp (Feb 28, 2011)

I about broke my neck when I tripped over some old phone line that was just up off the ground and hidden in the salal good enough to work as a trip wire.


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## Rounder (Feb 28, 2011)

Nice, I love that ####. Guy I was sawing next to last year found an Olympia beer belt buckle.....it had been there for a long while. Some old cat operator must of jumped off for a piss or something and lost it. Pretty cool.

My best finds have been peaveys and tongs on the bank of the Blackfoot River from back in the day when they drove logs down the crick. That's been around a hundred years ago, they slammed a rail in pretty quick after they finished hi-grading the river bank. I can just see some new guy getting handed a brand new peavey back then and falling off the first log he hopped on...bye bye new peavey- Sam


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## paccity (Feb 28, 2011)

maddhatte would like that buckle. it's the water.:msp_biggrin:


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## Rounder (Feb 28, 2011)

paccity said:


> maddhatte would like that buckle. it's the water.:msp_biggrin:


 
I bet he would...Ain't bad water - Sam


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## Humptulips (Feb 28, 2011)

madhatte said:


> I know where a couple of trestles from the steam era are slowly going back to the ground in Capitol Forest. There's a badly-decayed camp (also totally looted) near one of them.




My Dad worked in there at Bordeaux for Mason County logging Co. Still around to tell me stories. They had a big two donkey slacker that flew two 1 1/8" and one 1 1/4" choker. 
It was known as Larch Mountain in those days.

In regards to the OP I was working in the Deep Cr area on the Humptulips hanging back in some recently burned clearcuts. There were an amazing amount of stuff that showed up as a result of the burn.
Axe heads, saws, wedges, hammers, flat hooks, links. In one place I found where a blacksmith shop had been set up. Other then that I've found a Bagley scraper, mainline drum out of an old road donkey, several blocks, end hooks, swamp hooks, flat hooks, peter hooks, a couple old splash dams and a device known as a duke which I have used ( basically a device to pull a flat hook under a log)


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## Samlock (Mar 1, 2011)

The most common evidences of the old logging around here are the tar pits. They can be found everywhere. The tar production was the first form of commercial forestry here. The British navy sailed on the wooden ships treated with the Finnish tar.

Occasionally I stumble on the ruins of a forest sauna, a simple stove made of stones. The log walls and the roof is usually gone long time ago. The forest sauna was not a steam bath, but a living room, without a chimney. Loggers used them, as well as hunters and fishermen, and they were panic rooms as well, since this area was a war zone for several hundreds of years. By the ruins it is hard to tell, which one it was.

The metal detector idea is very interesting. I know few large logging sites, where the forest companies cut the old growth (what was left of it) in the first decades of the last century. Several hundreds men and horses spent their winters there. They must have left something behind. Yet, I suspect those camps are already cleaned out pretty well. The largest logging sites before the WW2 were in Suojärvi, which is now in the Russian side of the border. The forest companies managed to buy huge quantities of the old growth forest there in 20's, and they could cut some of it before the war. Hmm. It gives me something to think about.


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## ChrisF (Mar 1, 2011)

On topic but again not quite.
Samlock, I've got a finnish friend, and her father was a timber faller in the 1980s. She told me that the forests were sprayed with some sort of chemical to kill off unwanted kinds of plants/trees/whatnot to make logging faster/easier/cheaper. You've ever heard mention of or seen stuff like that?

Was a bit of an eye-opener to hear about something like that being done so recently and in our little corner of the world.


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## madhatte (Mar 1, 2011)

paccity said:


> maddhatte would like that buckle. it's the water.:msp_biggrin:


 
You know it!


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## Samlock (Mar 1, 2011)

On or off topic, who cares?

Haha, yes it is true, Chris. The poison sprayed in the woods in Finland was 2,4,5-T. Sold as "Agent Orange" in the USA.

Agent Orange killed everything green with the leaves on, but left conifers standing. It was used in managing the seedling stands - an option to the clearing saw. And it really worked, they say. It was sprayed with helicopters or aeroplanes. After the treatment the seedling stand looked like a moonscape - with pines and spruces.

In 1975 they sprayed 3,5 million liters Agent Orange in Finland. The godfathers of the forest business loved the stuff, but people hated it. I have no memories of that era, but they had to stop using herbicides in mid 80's due to the resistance. People - the treehuggers of that time - had a nasty habit to gather on the plots which were about to get treated. Well, they sprayed the plots anyway, people or not. It was such a bad PR, they had to stop poisoning.


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## RandyMac (Mar 1, 2011)

There was an old logging camp run by Hammonds in the Bald Hills above Orick, by Elk Camp. When I first found it, it was intact, right down to coffee cups on the table. There were quite a few folks that had been there and left it alone. Then some nutter from outside wrote an article on it and gave directions to it. It was stripped and burned within three months.
The are a few old camps in the Big Lagoon, still ok, protected by the landowners.


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## dancan (Mar 1, 2011)

Agent Orange , not nice stuff , basic info found here Agent Orange - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia .


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## TMFARM 2009 (Mar 1, 2011)

Samlock said:


> On or off topic, who cares?
> 
> Haha, yes it is true, Chris. The poison sprayed in the woods in Finland was 2,4,5-T. Sold as "Agent Orange" in the USA.
> 
> ...


you sure it wasn't gramoxone super? it was sold by Monsanto as a ground sterilizer,works up to five years... kills stuff in twenty minutes after contact..
it was awesome product you could spray trees around a field and by the time you made it around, the leaves would be dropping off.. 
we used the heck out of it around this area for a while... you cant get it anymore though..


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## Rounder (Mar 1, 2011)

RandyMac said:


> There was an old logging camp run by Hammonds in the Bald Hills above Orick, by Elk Camp. When I first found it, it was intact, right down to coffee cups on the table. There were quite a few folks that had been there and left it alone. Then some nutter from outside wrote an article on it and gave directions to it. It was stripped and burned within three months.
> The are a few old camps in the Big Lagoon, still ok, protected by the landowners.


 
We did a job this summer up a drainage called "Bug Crick". In the unit was an old logging camp the company put up in the '50's for the first hair cut. We came back to give it a trim..all the old cabins were still mostly intact. 

When the guys back in the day showed up for the job at their new home away from home, they abandoned the camp the first week. Skeeters.

We camped there for a couple months, and they sure as hell didn't misname bug crick. Sufferfest, lol - Sam

(nice scenery though)
View attachment 174425


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## Samlock (Mar 2, 2011)

TMFARM 2009 said:


> you sure it wasn't gramoxone super? it was sold by Monsanto as a ground sterilizer,works up to five years... kills stuff in twenty minutes after contact..
> it was awesome product you could spray trees around a field and by the time you made it around, the leaves would be dropping off..
> we used the heck out of it around this area for a while... you cant get it anymore though..



Well, I'm not aware of the different commercial brands. The herbicide used here was 2,4,5-trichlorophenol. Gramoxone super might well contained the same chemical. Monsanto delivered Agent Orange as well. The herbicide 2,4,5-T was used globally, the same way as glyphocate today. Of course the salesmen did not advertice too loud the fact it was basically the very same potion used to kill jungles of Vietnam.

2,4,5-T itself was not very toxic. The problem was that the chemical contaminated easily with TCDD - and that is a nasty poison indeed. TCDD circulates in the food chain for ages and messes up the animal DNA. Animals, including humans, exposed to TCDD, begin to have very peculiar offspring - with extra limbs or heads, with no limbs or head at all, and so on.

The contaminated stock should have been destroyed and never sprayed anywhere. I guess the US Air forces had no strict consumer policy, so they were not too picky and they used it all. That caused the catastrophy.

I do hope I won't find the traces of that kind of forest management in the woods, archaeologywise.


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## paccity (Mar 2, 2011)

logging archaeololgy , hmm. maybe a new show for the history channel
. na, theyed just turn it in to a unreality show.:hmm3grin2orange:


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## Samlock (Mar 3, 2011)

I just had an interesting chat with a fellow, who served 20 years as an officer of the Soviet/Russian Border Troops, located on the Finnish border. He is now retired and lives in Finland. A really tough fellow he is, worked in my crew after he got retired. He impressed me by swimming with a chainsaw across a freezing cold river to make a bridge for the rest of the crew.

I told him about my idea of digging about the logging camps in Suojärvi. He told me, the Russian Federation has recently declared the area as a border zone. He did not recommend pacing about inside the border zone with a metal detector. The Russians just have had enough of the Finns sneaking around the woods behind their back. 

Well, he certainly made the whole thing sound attempting to me.


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## RandyMac (Mar 3, 2011)

Sam, many of the border areas are probably full of unmarked graves. Many 1000s of Russians did not make it home from those two wars you had with them. Too bad you all ran out of bullets and had to give up turf.
I have two Finnish rifles from that period, both show extreme heavy use, I can only imagine......


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## Samlock (Mar 3, 2011)

As far as I know, only one of the old logging sites of Suojärvi is on the major battlefield -Battle of Kollaa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (Randy, check out the sniper link there and his rifle.)

Next week I am going to the meeting of Suojärvi Association. I hope to find there some people, who could help me to locate the camps.


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## paccity (Mar 7, 2011)

heres a crapy pic of said missery whip i found. kinda rough, but it will still go on the shop wall.View attachment 175269


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## roalco (Mar 9, 2011)

The "wet" coast out here is full of of old abandoned gear (once you get away from :biggrin: civilization), from donkeys to rigging to camps, but the neatest thing I ever found in the second growth was an old axehead with the handle just about rotted off. Cleaned it up and it turned out to be a Gransfors small forest axe, sent a pic of it and the unusual stamping to Gransfors and they dated it to the early 1930's. It got a clean up, a coat of Gun-coat and a new handle and it is one sweet little bush axe, 80 years old and it's still in use! I also found a couple of gransfors puget style double bit fallers axes in an old float camp, but they're not nearly as nice a carry...

View attachment 175500
View attachment 175501
View attachment 175502


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## HorseFaller (Mar 9, 2011)

I recently spotted a long cedar box in the rafters of my grandfathers shop. When i asked i was told it held at least three brand new crosscuts[without handles]. My grandfather had got them from his grandfather. He has a total of five including the two hanging on his shop wall with handles that he found when he worked in the woods. I can only hope that some day[hopefully not soon] they will be mine.


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