Thanks to
@Philbert who sent me these clips on disc and I am attempting to restore this old thread that was lost.
Originally digitized before the crash by
@dbabcock back in 2004 from Art's original 8mm films.
I'll intersperse Art's commentary with the clips in order.
The tree in clips one and two was located on the North Fork of Ten Mile River, which is about 30 miles north of Fort Bragg. The tree in the clip was almost 13 feet in diameter (circumference of 39 feet) and over 200 feet long. It had over 65,000 board feet (Spaulding scale) that is enough to build six medium size homes. We used 100 ton hydraulic jacks to tip it over. The company I worked for was the Union Lumber Company. It was established by C.R. Johnson in 1855. The Company owned thousands of acres of virgin timber in Mendocino County. The sawmill was located in Fort Bragg. At one time, the Company employed approximately 1,500 people. The mill’s output of lumber was mainly Redwood and Douglas Fir. The Johnson family owned the company until the mid-1960s when it was purchased by Boise Cascade. Later on it was purchased by Georgia-Pacific. That company closed the mill in October 2002. It was an end of an era in Fort Bragg. The mill is gone, as is the logger of big trees in Mendocino County.
For many years, the sawed lumber was transported on schooners. Loading the lumber onboard was a very treacherous job. Quite often, the straps holding the loads would snap and a whole load of lumber would fall into the water. When a schooner came into Noyo Bay and tied up to the log floats, the town’s people would line the banks to watch the large stacks of lumber being loaded. I remember, even as a child, how dangerous it looked when some hardy men would ride on top of the load of lumber down to the ship. The Pacific Ocean is very unstable at different times of the year. The schooner company would lose a ship now and then due to the unpredictable change in the weather which would cause shifting of the lumber in the hull. Sometimes, when a ship went down, lumber was strewn all over the rocks and beaches. People would go and salvage as much as they could to bring home. The ships usually were based in San Francisco and would travel up and down the coast to the different ports. Almost all of the major rivers had a mill with a log pond. The logs would end their journey down the river and end up in the log pond waiting to be sawed into lumber.
I was hoping Doug could display clip #3, it shows me bucking the first cut. The top of the log was over 6’ above my head. The trees on the clips were so big that extra caution was required to make sure the cuts were square with the tree. It takes a lot of experience to match up the cuts when sawing from both sides with a 7’ bar. The first log on both trees was 16’ with 6” trim allowance. The rest were 20’ with 6” trim allowance. The very top logs were whatever length came out. Starting at the minimum of 16’ (i.e., 16’, 20’, 24’, 32’ etc.). The company didn’t want odd length logs (i.e., 22’, 26’ 28’ for example) since they could only handle 24’ logs on the carriage in the mill. When the log lengths were 32’, the 1 ½’ was added for trim.
The logging crew came in and used dozers and what they called “wheel cats” to remove the logs from where they were felled and skidded to the landing for loading onto to trucks. The company had private roads and their trucks had 14’ bunks to carry out these enormous loads.
When falling large Douglas Fir trees, they were to be bucked in 8’ increments starting with 16’, 24’, 32’, 40’, plus trim, etc. When the log was 40’, then you had to add 4’ trim making it 44’ since that much was needed at the plyboard mill. There they were reduced to 8’ lengths to fit their lathes and made into veneer.
The big mill in Fort Bragg used large band saws. These band saws blades were really wide, at least a foot or more, and had teeth on both sides so the saws cut going forward and backward on the carriage.
