Sawmills

Sawmills

I thought that you might like to read about timber production, how the two by four gets from the forest to your back yard project.

The loggers in the woods cut down the trees.  When this was done by hand, either with an axe or with a saw with a handle at each end, it was a very difficult task, requiring the utmost in physical effort, hour after hour, day after day.  When power saws were introduced in the forties cutting down the tree became a little easier, and quicker. 

The buckers were the men who trimmed off the limbs and sawed the fallen tree into workable lengths, which were either dumped into a river or flooded creek to float down to the log pond next to the sawmill, or they were lifted onto trucks by a big crane attached to a tree and driven to the mill.  There were also flumes, which were virtual ditches made of wood supported by timbers that acted like a stream and carried the logs in water to the ever popular log pond.  When I was in Jr High School my dad and I would go deer hunting in the woods up past Wendling and we would sometimes walk the flumes, high above the ground looking down for deer.

The saw mill was where the logs were cut into boards similar to those one now buys at Home Depot. 

The star of the sawmill was the head sawyer.  Like a judge, he sat in a big easy chair with a host of buttons at his disposal.  The management would give the head sawyer a sheet of paper with the contract of lumber they need for that day.  The head sawyer was able to look at a log and estimate what he needed to do to begin the process of filling that contract.

There were men running across the logs floating in the pond carrying long handled tools with a hook at the end called a “peavey.”  Although they sometimes slipped and fell into the water they usually were able to hook the log they wanted and conduct it through all the other logs to a moving chain that would catch the log and pull it up onto a carriage where it waited for the sawyer to begin slicing.  He had a band saw, a continuous strip of toothed metal that whirred at a high speed.  The carriage brought the log up to the saw,  bzzzzt and a slab of wood fell onto another carriage.  There were air driven spikes that held the log and the slabs in place and by pushing one button or another the sawyer could flip the slab to the position he desired for another pass into the band saw.   The piece of wood he cut off of the slab was called a cant, and the cant was flipped on a set of rollers and sent into the mill itself.

In the mill were a sequence of tables with powered spikes and saws that would trim the ends of the cants and slice the cants into boards of various dimensions.  These operators also had a sheet of instructions and using their hands and knees they operated buttons that raised and lowered saws and hooks and produced the boards.  The boards then went down a series of belts where inspectors would decide the quality of the board and mark it with chalk.  This is the job my mother had during the war. 

After the board was marked it went to the green chain, which carried “green” boards, that is boards that were fresh from the pond and still full of moisture, down to a line of waiting men who manned separate stations along the length of the green chain and depending on the size and length of the board pulled it off and stacked it on a pile of similar boards.  This the job I had each summer I was in college.  It required little talent, but a lot of strength and energy.  We wore heavy leather mittens and a leather apron.  There were rollers running the length of the green chain to facilitate getting the boards from the chain table down to the stack of boards.  It was easy, just push down, guide the board across your apron, line it up and drop into the pile, jumping down every few feet of heights to throw a thin board across to stabilize the pile, then hop back up and grab the boards for which you were responsible from the unending line of boards.  If you missed one it would travel down to the end of the chain. If too many of your boards got past you the green chain foreman would come and have a talk with you.  You only stopped the chain in a dire emergency.

From the green chain the green lumber was taken to the drying sheds and then to the planer mill, where they went through mechanical planers which smoothed them down to salable pieces of wood.

The actions in the planer mill duplicated the green lumber mill.  The men on the planer chain again stacked the boards by width, thickness and length.  These stacks were taken to the yard boss, who oversaw storing the planed lumber before it was shipped out. 

Finished wood was shipped either by freight car, which involved Carloaders, men who loaded the wood into the boxcar, a job that combined strength, agility, and the ability to stack the boards in the most efficient manner; or it was shipped by truck.

The most onerous job in the planer mill was handling flooring, especially tongue and groove flooring.  These boards, usually one inch thick, six inches wide, ten to twenty feet long, were stacked six high by the planer men and tied at each end with twine then carefully piled one atop the other till the straddle bug swooped in, lifted up the load, and carried it to the yardman.  The yard workers had to pick up the six-board packages, toss them on their shoulder, and carefully place them in vertical storage to await the loaders.  The unskilled yard man on his first night of work could easily tear off the twine holding the bundles together resulting in a messy slowdown of production.

The hierarchy of the sawmill workers ran down in skill level from the head sawyer through the men who operated the various machines in the mill, then to the men who pulled boards and piled them up.  There were also clean up men and yard men, who swept up the sawdust and collected the broken pieces of wood that accumulated under the mill and under the chains and around the yard.  In Wendling in the early days this scrap wood was usually taken to a teepee burner, named for its shape, and burned.  The atmosphere of a sawmill town was usually thick with smoke, ash, and cinders.  We developed a skill in getting cinders out of our eyes.

In Springfield, when I was in college, the scrap wood was thrown into a chute that led to a giant wood grinder, called “the Hog.”  The ground up wood was used sold for wood chips or particle board.

 My first year I fed the Hog several times.   It was fast paced work, shoving wood in a chute while wood scraps came down from above, none of it tidily placed but sticking out every which way.  One summer day I came to work to find an ambulance and some policemen and several supervisors.  Some poor person on the day shift had been hooked by a broken board and pulled into the Hog, to his doom.

Other skilled jobs were saw filers, who spent the day sharpening all the various saws and replacing the dull ones on the line.

Of course the most important man to me was granddad, the head millwright.  He was the man who was in charge of repairing anything in the mill that broke, from a link on the green chain to the support frame for the overhead crane that was used to stack the cants, slabs of raw wood, in piles for later use.  Often I would come to work and see granddad and a group of his welders and oilers peering  at a nonworking piece of machinery.  They had to be efficient and skilled in order to keep the endless chain of wood moving down the line.

Now there are few sawmills in the Willamette Valley, and now computers have replaced most of the men who ran the various saws and other machines. But as you drive by one of the remaining sawmills if you look closely you will see men pulling boards off of the green chain, and you will still see a couple of millwrights gazing dolefully at a broken piece of machinery.