Welcome to today's history sandwiched-in program.
We are excited to have you all with us this afternoon.
For those of you joining us for the first time,
this program runs throughout the year from March through November,
highlighting a range of topics that are relevant to the history,
places, spaces, and people of Wisconsin and the broader Midwest.
For individuals or groups who have attended a previous sandwiched-in program,
welcome back.
I am very excited to welcome and introduce our speaker for the day.
My name is Jenny Peterson, and I am the Public Programs Manager
with the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Again, it is a pleasure to have you all with us.
A note that the opinions expressed today during the presentation
are those of the speaker and not those of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or the Society's employees.
Now to our main show.
It is an absolute pleasure to introduce Susie Apps-Bodili,
who is presenting Timber, a northwood story of lumberjacks,
logging, and the land, based on her book co-authored with Jerry Apps.
Before I hand it over, I am excited to share a brief biography of our presenter.
Susie is a retired educator and writer.
She taught elementary and middle school students for 34 years.
She holds a bachelor's in elementary education and a master's in curriculum
and instruction.
As she is not reading or writing, Susie enjoys spending time with her family,
hiking at the family cabin, kayaking, and trying new recipes
with produce from her garden.
In addition to being the co-author of Timber,
the topic of today's presentation, Susie is also author of Seeds in Soil,
planting a garden and finding your roots.
One room schools, stories from the days of one room, one teacher,
eight grades, and also a co-author alongside Jerry Apps
of Old Farm Country Cookbook.
Please join me in welcoming Susie and enjoy the presentation, everyone.
Okay, thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you today.
I'm so happy to be here.
Jenny kind of already said this, but I will reiterate that
all the photos in my presentation are from my personal collection
or photos from the Wisconsin Historical Society, image collection,
and as indicated.
And then if I used a photo from someplace else,
I did source where I got it from on the slide.
And also all opinions are my own, just a bit of a disclaimer.
In Wisconsin, educators are used Wisconsin Act 31 that was put out in 1989.
It's a law mandating public schools to provide instruction on the history,
culture, and tribal sovereignty of Wisconsin's recognized American Indian
nations.
So because of that, I always start all of my talks no matter where I am in
the state with a land acknowledgement statement.
So to start today, I want to recognize and respect the inherent sovereignty
of the native nations within the boundaries of the state of Wisconsin.
And also, I'm so pleased to be here.
This is actually a rescheduling from an event that I had planned last fall.
So I'm so appreciative to Jenny for allowing me to come this year instead.
So I'd like to thank the Wisconsin Historical Society and also public
television.
As Jenny already mentioned, I was an educator for 34 years in middle school
and elementary school, mostly in Madison at Falk,
which is now Annana Elementary and Sherman Middle School and Mendota
Elementary on the north side.
I also taught briefly in Princeton, Wisconsin and in Ohio.
And today, as Jenny mentioned, I like to kayak.
I like to be outside.
I enjoy cooking and I do actually a lot of presentations around the state,
which I really enjoy because I still educating people about topics that are
important to me.
I go and speak at several.
I've been to lots of libraries, historical society groups, any kind of group
that was interested in having a speaker about topics on any of my books.
I really enjoy getting out and meeting people.
As Jenny mentioned, I wrote a book about one room schools that was published
by the Historical Society in 2013.
My seeds in soil book came out in 2022.
Old Farm Country Cookbook was published in 2017,
which was sort of the inspiration for the public television film,
Jerry Apps, Food and Memories.
Anybody seen that movie?
You can stream it if you haven't seen it.
It's really fun and I'm cooking in it.
It's really was so much fun to work with the folks from public television
because they were so awesome.
And we actually really enjoyed putting that film together.
So today, though, we're going to talk about timber,
a Northwood story of lumberjacks logging and the land.
My book was written for young readers.
However, I really encourage anyone of any age to pick up the book
and read it yourself or find some younger readers to read it with.
My purpose for the book is to get young readers and families to ask questions.
As an educator, I was always encouraging students to think critically
and use inquiry strategies, ask questions to find out about the past.
For example, when you pick up this book, it might help you think
what was it like to live and work in the woods?
And then what happened after the forests were cut down in our state?
So my purpose for the book is to use history and the past
to think about what happened and then get kids and families thinking
about how that can be incorporated into thinking about today.
I definitely grew up loving trees.
The black and white picture is, I hear you chuckling.
That's me sitting in a tree because that's how I spent quite a lot of my summer
at our family cabin.
That's a willow tree that has been hit by lightning,
and there was a branch that fell over.
My dad tied a rope into the tree and a swing.
And my brothers and I, we spent hours just hanging out in the tree.
So I was very fond of trees and being outside in general.
At our family cabin in Washira County, we have 120 acres,
which is part of managed, it's a managed tree farm today.
So we do still do spring tree planting every year.
That's my husband and my brother.
We maintain our woods and we try to get rid of invasive species,
maintain the paths and create a space that's enjoyable for our family
and friends and people to spend time out in nature.
Today, have you ever cut down a tree? Just raise your hand.
Anybody have experience?
Oh, several people have actually cut down a tree.
I don't mean like a backyard tree.
Most people do yard work and that kind of tree cutting,
but to cut down an actual tree to use the wood for a wood stove
might be something that you're familiar with or maybe not.
Does anybody have a relative that you know worked in a logging camp
in the past in Wisconsin?
Okay, you do. Nice. We can talk afterwards.
I always am really interested in what people know as their own family
personal history because that gives me more information
and I just love hearing your stories.
Alright, let's learn about logging in the past.
I like to start my talks with a definition about what I consider history is.
This is the definition of history that's actually in the Historical Society
of the Press book for fourth graders, the textbook,
called Wisconsin, Our State, Our Story.
So what is history?
History is the study of the events of the past
and people who lived in the past.
Who tells about the past?
Historians study the past and explain it through stories.
No one person can describe every event.
And that statement is extremely important to me
and to anybody really it should be, anybody who is studying history
because you should not take one person's story from the past
without checking multiple sources and checking those stories
against each other to see if they match or if they're different.
People encounter history from different perspectives
and different personal biases and that's something you need to consider
when you're taking a look at history.
How do we tell about the past?
Historians ask questions
and then they need evidence to answer the questions.
Basically you can't just make it up.
Historians ask themselves then does this piece of information matter and why?
In the history textbook that students use
and I actually did use it also with second graders.
It's not just for fourth grade and above.
There's a sort of a brainstorming chart that looks like this
and it has phrases and information to help kids think about the past.
It's also presented in a book like this more of a bar graph
helping students understand how to think about the past.
So the green one says cause and effect.
What were the causes of past events and what were the effects?
The orangeish one is change in continuity.
This one's really interesting to think about even with young kids
because you can talk about what is changed fairly easily
because things change quickly.
Things, how do you use a phone?
What phones did you use in the past?
What did your grandma use for a phone?
Things have changed that are noticeable to young students.
And then what has remained the same?
Who has benefited from changes and who has not benefited and why?
The blue one says turning points.
How did past decisions or actions affect future choices?
The purple one says using the past.
How does the past help us make sense of the present?
And through their eyes is the orange one which I also talk to students
as the idea of putting yourself in someone else's shoes.
How do people in the past view their world and then how did that inform their choices and actions?
When you're doing research on a topic, it's important to check secondary sources
which are things that historians look at and study questions that people have already explored.
Lucky for me, my dad, Jerry Apps, had already written a book about the history of logging,
collecting lots and lots of reference material.
His book is called When the White Pine was King, a history of lumberjacks, log drives
and sawdust cities in Wisconsin.
It's written for adults and I know they have it in the museum store because I checked it out.
It's also published by the Historical Society Press.
So it's an example of a secondary source that I pulled from a lot to get a general idea of what to put in the Young Readers book.
However, my book is quite a bit different because our audience was different.
We were trying to engage young kids.
Therefore, my book does not have specific information about logging companies or businesses
or things that young readers maybe wouldn't be interested in.
It's also important looking at the past to check out primary sources,
which are things that were written or made at the time in the past you are studying.
And those are the things I actually find the most interesting.
For example, diaries, letters, drawings, photos, actual artifacts.
In my book, I have lots of primary sources that were reprinted from actual letters from the past
and in the book, that little magnifying glass icon shows the reader that you're getting an actual primary source.
I'll just read the first part of this.
It's about John, a lumberjack who worked in Green Bay when he was 16.
It says, it's December.
It says, dear father and mother, I got your kind and welcome letter the 1st of December.
I think you are all expecting a letter.
I am getting along all right and I hope you are the same.
We had a big snowstorm Monday and it lasted all day.
I have 34 working days in.
I don't think of coming down for Christmas.
They're going to start hauling after New Year's.
The fellow that used to sleep near me jumped, which means he quit, Monday,
and he helped himself to my drawers in a pair of mitts,
meaning he got his underwear stolen and his mittens.
You need not trouble yourself by sending anything down.
I will see that I dress with what I got and it goes on.
Then in the book, there are some questions for the young waiter to think about after reading the letter.
Obviously, the fact that he's not coming home for Christmas would give a young reader cause.
That doesn't feel good.
The kid that left stole his clothes.
Interesting things to think about.
Primary sources, again, show us how people lived, acted, and felt.
They help us explore the ways our lives are different from or similar to the way people lived in the past.
Again, it's important to think about where the source came from, who made it, and why.
Why was it made?
All right, so today's plan for my talk is I'm going to give you a short history of Wisconsin leading up to the logging era,
which is brief and incomplete.
But it's important for the context of why the logging era and the logging boom became so important in Wisconsin.
In general, what was the logging camp?
How were logs transported to the mill and how did technology change logging?
What happened after the logging era?
And then I'm ending my talk with an encouragement to be someone who cares for trees, probably you are because you are here today.
So you can look for those little circle colored icons to sort of know where we are in the talk.
First, a short history of Wisconsin leading up to the logging era.
So you probably know about the glacier.
Wisconsin's last glacier produced tundra conditions that continued from about 26,000 to about 10,000 years ago.
The glaciers moved scraped and carried rocks and sand.
They changed the land's elevation as they moved south.
About 10,000 years ago, the weather began to change.
The air got warmer and the glaciers began to melt.
I have lots of visual maps and things in the book for young readers and families to talk about.
Clearly, the key in this map just shows pines and hardwoods.
Clearly, it's not specific to certain kinds of trees, but it gives you an idea of where most of the trees were in Wisconsin,
which clearly becomes important to the northern part of Wisconsin as the logging boom went on.
Trees began to grow after the glacier.
Some of the first were spruce, then jack pine, red pine, and balsam fur.
Of course, according to origin stories of native nations, people have always lived on the land and found home in our land we now call Wisconsin.
In the 60s, I just moved ahead like a whole bunch of years.
In the 1600s, Europeans started to arrive.
They noticed, of course, that Wisconsin has many lakes and rivers and the forests were full of animals, which led us to a 200-year period of the fur trade.
Explorers came looking for rivers and routes to the west, which clearly they were looking for trade routes in Asia,
but they are hitting North America instead.
Some came looking for animals such as beaver, mink, and otter.
The fur trade era then specifically is about 1600 into the early 1800s.
Those hats were made from beaver pelts because they were soft and very waterproof and they became very popular in Europe.
Explorers traded blankets and metal cooking pots for beaver pelts.
Indians also traded wild rice, maple sugar, fish, and information about waterways.
So many pelts were wanted, almost all of the beavers were killed.
The fur trade era continued for more than 200 years controlled by the French, the British, and US governments.
I'm skipping over a couple of wars in there, which if you're interested in, of course, you can read more about that.
We come to the early 1800s when thousands of settlers arrived from the eastern United States and Europe.
They wanted to use land for farming and, of course, they needed wood to build homes, barns, and furniture.
In 1836, Wisconsin became a territory.
The US government signed a treaty that forced Menominee people to seed half of their land and waters.
Here's a really great map.
If you don't know about it already, you can look it up on a site called Wisconsin First Nations.
It's a tribal lands map showing tribal lands in the 1800s and present-day native nations in the little squares.
It's a really interesting map to use with students because it's so visual and explains so well where our native nations were prior to tribal treaties.
This is a picture of our pond at our land.
In 1837, the US government forced Ho Chunk, Ojibwa, and Dakota nations to sign treaties.
This allowed them to take more native lands.
Of course, you know that the treaties were unfair to native nations because they didn't realize the government would own the land.
It's not how native nations thought about land use.
In the mid-1800s, populations grew very, very quickly.
By 1846, most of today's southern and eastern counties were settled, and in 1848, Wisconsin becomes a state.
Well, what's happening to encourage people to live here?
Well, there was a big boon in mining in part of the state.
Of course, you've heard of the Badgers, which is why we are named the Badgers because of the early miners that lived in dens or caves on the side of the hill.
In 1849, the California Gold Rush began, so lots of people who had been mining in the state decided to leave and go to California.
Between 1840 and 1900, there was lots of farming going on in Wisconsin.
In 1860, it was the year of the largest wheat harvest in Wisconsin.
However, the wheat farmers did not become loggers because in the 1860s, there was quite a bit of damage to the wheat farming and chinchbugs damaged the wheat.
So some farmers who really wanted to grow wheat, they moved west.
The ones that stayed turned to other crops like oats, hay, corn, potatoes, tobacco, hops for beer, obviously, and dairy.
Of course, in the middle, late 1860s was the Civil War also.
So that brings us to the logging industry. If you're not mining anymore and your wheat is not growing anymore and you have to shift gears,
there became an opportunity to become a lumberjack.
So between 1840 and the 1900s were logging years in Wisconsin.
Plus, thousands more settlers were coming.
They needed lumber to build homes, barns, schools, stores.
Also, people from cities like Chicago and St. Louis also bought lumber from Wisconsin logging companies.
I just love that log with schoolhouse, it looks like you'd be freezing in the air if you were a one-room school teacher in that log schoolhouse.
Settlers and loggers chose white pines, which we had in our state.
Very, very tall, beautiful white pines.
Tall, they were tall and straight. They were easy to cut with hand tools.
It's a soft wood. They made sturdy walls and floors.
And does anybody know their really huge reason why they chose white pine?
He did this. This gentleman did this. I'm assuming you don't mean flying. They floated.
Yes, they float. White pine logs float in water.
We have water. We have white pine. We have water.
This works out beautifully for people who wanted to log in Wisconsin.
I love this picture, too, because those guys don't look very old.
They look young and ready to get to work.
By 1855, logging and milling became important industries.
And by 1871, Wisconsin led the nation in lumber production.
Look at this picture with the giant tree stump.
Huge. Wisconsin's trees were important to the state's timber industry.
And our state provided lumber for many.
All right. What was a logging camp?
I've done this talk with students, and when I say the word camp, they think camp.
You know, like crafts, s'mores, sleepover, it's not that kind of a camp.
Logging camps were work camps. It was not for fun.
Work camps in forests where loggers worked and lived during the winter.
I had students ask me why the winter?
Well, the frozen ground made it easier to move the logs
and animals could pull a sled full of logs over the snow without worrying about mud
and water and ruts in the road.
Also, some farmers were available to work in the winter.
And there were no insects.
We know about mosquitoes and insects here in the summer.
So in the woods in the winter, there were no insects that bothered the people or the animals.
Typical buildings in the camp were a bunkhouse, an outhouse, a cookhouse.
The blacksmith shed, a barn, and a storage shed.
This picture shows a typical setup for an early logging camp.
A timber cruiser would go on ahead and figure out where a camp could be placed.
And you can see the river in the background there.
It needed to be near water.
And then later on, if a camp was going to be more permanent and larger,
they made more permanent structures.
This one at the beginning, they were clearly not meant to be lasting a long time.
They were wood with tar paper roofs.
In early logging camps, most lumberjacks did a variety of jobs.
But as the camps became larger, each person was assigned to one job,
which helped the camp run smoothly.
These are dish pans at the Rhylander Pioneer Park Historical Complex.
The logging crew.
Chopping down trees and cutting them into logs was dangerous hard work.
And I love all of these pictures.
If you are interested in finding and looking at more pictures from logging era,
there are lots of images on Wisconsin Historical Society website.
The typical jobs in a camp were the foremen, who was the boss.
He kept order among the lumberjacks.
The cook planned and prepared all the meals.
And the cook's assistant, hauled water, and wood, got things ready.
They ate three big meals a day, and typically they were not allowed to talk
while they were eating, because eating was for eating,
and then you had to get back to work.
So very large amounts of food, and then you just ate, and you laughed.
It wasn't a social time.
If you were too far away from camp in the woods,
sometimes the cook and cookie would bring lunch to you in the woods,
so you took a little bit of a break, ate your lunch, you got back to work.
The teamster drove the team of animals that pulled the sleds and cared for animals.
By the 1850s, horses were used more than oxen, which were faster and easier to care for.
Of course, the blacksmith then made and repaired tools, lots and lots of different tools.
So if you're talking with younger readers and thinking about history,
sometimes a thing like tools, thinking about tools from the past versus tools from today,
what has changed, what has stayed the same.
Sometimes something like a tool is a hook to get kids interested in the past.
Interestingly, I've done this talk for kids, and I said horseshoes,
and they are picturing shoes, like Nike's.
They even said to me, there's no shoes on that horse,
and I said, that's not the kind of shoe I'm talking about.
So I had to put a little picture of a horseshoe in my slides
so that they knew that a horseshoe was something that protected and supported the horses' hooves,
and that's a shoe like you were today.
So that's one thing that's definitely changed as far as kids think about.
The fitter used an axe to chop a notch into the tree.
So those of you who have chopped down a large tree, you know about notching a tree.
In theory, the tree will fall toward the notch,
and it's not as easy as you would think to plan how a tree will fall.
I know that when we've cut trees for our wood stove at our cabin,
we have to spend considerable amount of time walking around and looking at the tree,
and looking at what's around the tree, and figuring out how is that tree going to fall
based on how you think it's going to fall.
It's called, my brother and people call it reading the tree.
Like I said, tools.
Sometimes kids are really interested in tools.
It's not just for Halloween.
They actually have a purpose.
So a single bit, there are names for all of the tools,
and I have had students that were just interested in knowing names for every single thing.
If you come across a youngster that likes to name and know names of things,
this is the tools from logging out for you.
This is the single bit axe, which is for chopping and splitting wood.
The double bit axe, of course, has two sides that are sharp,
and one side at least is kept sharp so you can trade and use the other side.
But oh my gosh, that seems dangerous.
To me to have two sharp edges like that flying around.
Two lumberjacks held each end of a cross cut saw,
and I like that little diagram of where the tree is supposed to fall based on the notch.
They sawed on the side opposite of the notch.
Two people sawing together.
You didn't push, you pulled the saw.
If you pushed a saw, it jams up.
They used axes or saws to remove the limbs from the trunk of the tree,
and the logs were cut into different lengths based on what your company sawmill wanted you to cut them to.
12, 14, 16 feet.
The skitter is a verb, meaning you're skidding the logs to the riverbank,
but it's also the name of the job of the person who used the skitter,
so the sled is hooked to that big log and then the horses pull it to the river.
A swamper made the sled tracks in the woods and cut away brush for the skitters,
and the logs were very carefully stacked onto a sled.
I've had students who are extremely fascinated by how that could possibly work,
because, clearly, you can't lift those logs with manpower.
You're doing a pulley system and a certain amount of physics to figure out how to get those logs up on the sled.
This picture, my dad and I collaborated on pictures and images for the book,
and he said, that's not a real picture.
And I said, it's a photograph, and he said they wouldn't have done that.
He thinks, in his opinion, they wouldn't have stacked a sled that high,
and then climbed on top of it and rode to the river.
He says, it's just too dangerous.
So he is thinking that a photographer went from camp to camp to camp and took pictures.
So what my dad said is it is a show-off picture,
that they were trying to show off how capable they were and how much they could pile on the top without falling off,
but that's probably not how they took the load to the river.
At the river, the log scaler recorded the quantity and quality of every single log.
How did you mark the logs came from your camp?
Well, the blacksmith made and implemented a tool that pounded the letters into the end of each log in several places.
The letters represent the camp where the log was cut.
The company owner only received money for the logs that made it to the sawmill.
Lumberjacks cut as many trees as they could during a winter.
It was exhausting work.
Were there any women in camp?
Sometimes.
Sometimes there were women in children in camp if they were a family of, say, the foreman or the blacksmith.
In general, someone just asked me last week, were there any woman in Lumberjacks,
and I have not found evidence that there were.
You might know differently, but I don't think so.
I do have in the book a nice primary source story about a woman who was hired to be in a camp in the kitchen,
working in the kitchen organizing all the materials for the kitchen,
and she had a baby there with her all winter, so that's really fun to read about.
They did have a day off, just one on Sunday.
For reading, letter writing, mending clothes, or laundry,
it was really fun in the evening and on the weekends to play music, to sing, to tell stories, and have some fun.
One story that is very popular that came from the logging years was from Eugene Shepard,
who reported that he saw a real hodeg.
It was near the town of Rhymelander.
It was a seven-foot-long lizard-like beast, and it looked about 185 pounds.
The beast had a large head with two horns.
The body was spiked.
It smelled terrible, like a skunk.
I know that he actually...
It was a complete hoax, obviously, and he actually tricked people into seeing a hodeg at county affairs
and paying money to see a fake animal at the county fairs.
Of course, in Rhymelander, at the Chamber of Commerce, there's a big statue of a hodeg there today.
Also, Paul Bunyan.
Paul Bunyan was the greatest lumberjack of all, of course, in the Midwest.
In my book, I have just elements of what makes a tall tale.
I have always found that kids are really intrigued by any story that's a tall tale,
because, of course, the main characters have superhuman abilities.
It's our own Midwestern superheroes.
They're very tall, very fast, they're very strong.
The main character generally gets help from an object or an animal.
In Paul's case, it was Babe, the Ox.
Usually, the tall tale describes an everyday problem, and the main character can solve the problem in funny ways.
There are lots of stories about Paul Bunyan, like he tied a rope to the end of his axe
and cut 40 acres of pine trees with a single swing,
and he carved the Great Lakes by dragging his axe behind him.
That's a fun... I can imagine it would be fun if you were a lumberjack and you were very tired
and you could have somebody do your work for you.
Alright, how did the logs travel to the sawmill?
In the spring, they waited for the rivers to open up.
This is a really cool picture of logs piled very high on a riverbank.
When spring arrived, the ice and snow melted and the logs could now float downstream.
In Wisconsin, rivers were essential during the early days of the lumber industry
to transport logs to the sawmill.
Moving logs by floating them on a river was called a log drive.
It was sometimes the same men, but usually a different crew that was hired by a river driver
because they were the most skilled, the most able to do this work.
The men on the front crew balanced on the logs on the Pestigo River in this picture,
and here's another tool that used those long pike poles to sort of corral the logs
and make them go the direction they wanted.
I mean, does that look like fun or does it look incredibly dangerous?
I mean, you decide.
They did wear different clothes.
They wore different clothes in the winter, obviously.
They needed to be clothes that would dry quickly if they did fall in,
and they had shoes with cleats to help them stay on the logs.
This is a picture of a logger, cleated shoes on the river drive.
The river pilot was in charge of this special crew and hired highly skilled lumberjacks
for the log drive.
This picture shows a log drive on the Wisconsin River.
The men worked from very, very early in the morning before sunrise until sunset.
And it was a tourist attraction.
If you lived near a river where there was a log drive, people came to watch.
So this was made into a postcard.
It's a log drive on the rural river near Florence, Wisconsin.
Of course, they needed to eat, so there was a cook's tent,
and this is a cook's tent on the Wisconsin River in 1913.
There is also a famous wooden one again named the Dancing Annie,
about 1900, and I do see more women on this river drive.
It was also the river driver's office.
They stored men's sleeping bundles, some clothes.
Here's a member of a crew near the Chippewa River about 1905,
the tool that they're using as a PV, which has a pointed end,
and it's got that hook.
We still have one at our farm today that we use for moving logs around.
The rear crew used batot boats to follow behind the logs,
because they didn't want to lose any of the logs.
They wanted as many logs as possible to get to the sawmill.
The batot boat is a leftover special boat from the fur trading days.
One of the worst things that could happen on a river drive was obviously
a log jam.
Logs got stuck, and other logs piled up behind them.
If you're wondering, how could this happen if they're right there with the logs?
Well, I imagine it just, they didn't do it on purpose, obviously,
but there were a few that got jammed up, and then, depending on the current,
the weather, who was helping?
They just kept bashing into each other and piling up.
It was a big problem because it essentially made a dam in the river.
Also, tourist attractions.
So there are postcards that were made of log jams and sent out to people.
How did they break up the log jam?
Well, they were walking around on them, which you can imagine, not too safe.
Sometimes they tied horses to the logs with the rope.
Larger companies, if they could afford it, blew it up to get it to move again.
That's expensive because you're blowing up your product.
You're trying to get to the sawmill.
Here's a very, kind of a famous massive log jam on the St.
Croix in 1886.
And at first, you can't even see these people, but there they are.
I circled them.
It's such a massive log jam that you have to kind of look closely to see the people
walking on there trying to figure out what to do.
This is the St. Croix.
Do you see the bridge in the back of this picture?
I think the same croix in the St. Croix.
I found another picture with that same bridge.
So you can see why it jammed up.
The logs just didn't make it around the corner there.
The log jam on the St. Croix famously took 200 men, 100 horses, and boats to break it up.
So the river driver would have had to hire extra people to unstick.
The stuck logs.
Here's a log jam near the Black River Falls.
Also, a huge mess, and you can't really see the low person until you look closely.
But there he is.
Sitting in the middle of a giant log jam.
They're not moving.
Early sawmills were located near Wisconsin's largest waterways.
I need to tell you that someone came up to me after a talk I did and said those aren't
all the sawmills.
I said, I know.
I realized we didn't put every sawmill in Wisconsin on the map.
It was just for young readers to identify that sawmills were generally in certain areas
of the state.
And the question you can ask is, why are there so many sawmills on the Wisconsin River and
on that crook right there by the Fox River in Lake Winnebago?
Well, the answer, obviously, to the Wisconsin River question is because it was so crooked
that you couldn't avoid log jams and you had to put more sawmills than along the Wisconsin
River because they just couldn't flow through there as well.
After many days or weeks on the river, the logs reached the sawmills mill pond, which
if you drive around Wisconsin, there are many, many ponds called mill ponds still because
there was a mill there.
Workers steered logs floating in the Wisconsin River into the building in this picture.
They had to work with and against the river currents, so you needed to know the river.
You needed to understand water and how it worked.
Of course, early sawmills and mills had been around in Wisconsin.
They used water to capture energy from the river's current.
As the water turned, it powered smaller wheels and gears in the building.
Rods moved the saws to make board lumber.
Water wheels in Wisconsin also had been used to grain grain into flour and griss mill,
and it was very typical for small rural communities to have a mill on a mill pond.
If you know young people who are like Legos, they like building, and I was talking to my
editors about mills and things, and I said we need to have all of that engineering-ish
type of thing in this book because I know I would call them Lego kids.
There are kids that are really interested in that, so if that's something that hooks
them into history, then I love that.
Here's a picture of men using a circular saw to cut a log, and my dad said that he remembers
this exact kind of saw that was available for people to come and use in wild rows.
A man stands at each end, and they work to guide the log across the saw, but check out
how they have no safety equipment.
I think they're wearing gloves, but otherwise that doesn't look real safe today, so that
is one thing that has changed.
Here's another kind of a saw.
It's a circular saw powered by an engine when that was available.
Working with saws was very dangerous, and other issues in the sawmill I have in my book
were issues of extra sawdust in the waste and fire danger, and lots of issues in a sawmill
in general.
However, we grew, as a state, villages grew where there was a sawmill.
Many, many towns in the north began as sawmill cities.
This is a picture of Rice Lake Lumber Company after 1872.
Of course, in Oshkosh, the waters of the Fox River, empty into Lake Winnebago at Oshkosh,
this provided the city with power to build lumber, grismills, furniture, equipment, and
equipment factories.
Technology did change logging in the late 1800s.
Does anybody have an idea what that technology was?
You can shout it out, and I will repeat it.
Say it again.
A train.
A train.
Yes.
What kind of train?
Well, it was a steam train.
Steam power.
It was the big change in technology in the late 1800s.
You're exactly right.
Steam boats and steam trains really changed everything.
Logging, I love this picture of this postcard on the Mississippi.
Logging companies began using steam boats to push huge rafts of lumber.
So picture the Mississippi and where that's going, it's going south, right, even to St.
Louis.
People also traveled by steamboat, of course.
By the early 1910s, trains made their way into the north woods.
Now, this is the big difference, the cause and the effect, what was the effect of trains
coming, logging cams did not need to be located near water.
Larger logging companies, if they could afford it, no longer used a river drive to transport
their logs.
Logs could now be moved by train.
Trees could be cut any time of the year, not just winter.
So you can imagine how that increased all their work in hiring and all sorts of effects.
Logging companies cut hardwoods such as oak and maple, which would not float, and this
wood became in high demand.
So as a result of all of this, I love this picture because it speaks volumes, between
1970 to 1890, where the peak logging years in Wisconsin, logging companies provided lumber
for homes, furniture, tools, anything made of wood, the industry provided many, many
jobs in the forests and in the mills.
Many towns and cities grew while the logging industry was booming.
Logging also supported other businesses, mid-shingles, barrels, wagons, and furniture.
But what happened next?
The land in the north was bare and full of stumps because logging companies logged and
they moved out.
They mostly didn't care about going back in and cleaning up because they were moving
to the next space to cut trees.
Acres of land were covered with slash or left behind brush and branches.
And slash is, of course, if you remember that picture of the really, really tall pine tree
at the very top where the branches are, that's where the knots on the trunk are.
So they would just cut those branches off and leave them as slash in the woods.
The land in the north became known as the cut over.
Why is that a problem?
Well, trees are important.
Tree roots help keep soil in place.
And with fewer trees, the land was no longer protected from erosion.
Without trees, the top layer of soil, the top soil, washed and blew away.
And the land in general became very, very dry.
Specifically on October 8th, 1871, you might know this date because it was the date of
the Pestical Fire, which started because they were trying to clean up slash in burning
and the fire.
It was a trifecta of weather conditions and heat.
In the small fire turning into a giant fire, the fire could not be stopped.
The fire burned more than one million acres of forest and many, many people died.
Incidentally, it was the same day as the Great Chicago Fire.
So in Pestical, people did not come to help as quickly because lots of help in aid were
sent to Chicago to help people after the Great Chicago Fire, which was the same day.
The Great Chicago Fire, however, proved a boon to Oshkosh's lumber trade as much of the
lumber used to rebuild the city of Chicago came from Oshkosh Mills.
By 1873, 24 sawmills, 15 shingle mills, and seven sashindoor factories were in operation,
earning Oshkosh the name sawtas city.
There's a picture of the Payne Center, who is a very fancy stone house built by Nathan
Payne, who was a lumber company owner in Oshkosh.
In the north, the logging boom was over.
Some mills tried to switch to pulp and paper, and people were encouraged to try to farm
this cut over land.
This picture is really funny because clearly a cabbage is not that big.
The state did produce promotional photographs and adds even to people in Europe come and
get this land, come and farm on this land in northern Wisconsin called the cut over.
So people did, they came.
However, removing all those giant stumps was not easy.
Folks from the UW Extension were up there trying to help people remove the stumps,
and sometimes they, again, just blew them up.
Here's a picture of a man using a tractor to remove a stump from cut over land.
And sometimes they just plowed around the stumps and tried to farm and left the stumps there.
In the early 1900s, many decision makers continued to promote the idea of farming.
Some people believe the land's just going to restore itself.
It's going to self-seed.
The trees will come back.
By 1904, there were people in Wisconsin who said that's not going to work.
They developed a forestry law and passed a law that helped the cut over lands.
For example, the law created a state department of forestry, a system of state forest, a forest
reserve, including 62,000 acres of land in O'Nida, Viola, and Iron Counties.
They hired a state forester to oversee this process.
In 1911, work began at the new state supported Trout Lake Tree Nursery.
Young pines, however, young pines, they need at least two years to grow before you can transplant them,
so it was going to take a while.
Many people did try farming the cut over lands.
However, the soil was too poor and the growing season too short.
Decision makers continued to disagree about what to do with the land.
You could probably infer that there is more to the story.
It has to do with taxes and who was in government at the time.
And did they have personal interest in logging companies?
And there is a lot more to that, this small statement.
After some delays by the mid-1920s, a majority of voters in Wisconsin said,
reforestation should remain legal.
Plans for reforestation of the cut over continued.
And by 1932, the Griffith Tree Nursery opened, which also helped provide trees for reforestation.
Also in the thirties, of course, was the Great Depression.
Jerry Epps has also written a really fine book about the Civilian Conservation Corps,
which talks about all of the work they did to replant trees and take care of our newly formed state parks,
provide conditions in forests that improved.
Also managed fire danger and created those tall fire towers that we see today in state parks.
The CCC during 1935 to 1942 hired young men to revitalize our forests.
In many of our state parks today, you can see signs that show that something was built by the Wisconsin Conservation Corps.
Last summer, I took this giant Brady's Bluff hike and we went to the top where they have a shelter house made by the CCC guys.
We are so lucky in our state that we have state and national forest land that's open to the public.
So I really encourage if you have young friends or anybody in your family to get out and go in the woods.
How are our forests managed in our state?
There are different tree cutting plans.
The state parks and the Wisconsin state forests are different.
The state forests have active forest management, including timber sales.
The state parks focus on protecting natural resources for public enjoyment and have limited harvesting of trees.
Today, many people enjoy the northwoods of Wisconsin for tourism opportunities.
The future of forests, obviously, I wrote this book because I want young people and their families to value trees.
That's my husband and I walking in Door County.
Why should we care about trees?
Trees help us in its basic level.
Trees help make us healthy.
They provide homes for wildlife.
You can have fun out in nature in the woods and they're just beautiful.
The end of my book really encourages you to be someone who cares for trees.
If this is a way to encourage young readers to think about being out in nature and taking care of it,
you can teach them about natural resources, which is covered in school.
But sometimes kids don't understand what natural resources are and they think water, air, plants are just there for us to use.
But obviously, we need to care for things that are valuable to us.
It's important to think about how our use of natural resources has changed over time.
For example, this logging camp in the picture on the image, it said it was near Black River Falls.
Today, the Black River State Forest is nearby.
You can enjoy nature where loggers once worked.
Over the years, people have used our state's natural resources to make a living.
There's nothing wrong with making a living in Wisconsin.
Miners, farmers, and loggers all played their part in the early growth of Wisconsin.
Technology improved as well.
It changed the way that people worked with and transported natural resources.
It also changed the kind of products that were made.
Learning how people use natural resources in the past helps you understand the choices people make today.
That's my husband and my daughter and our grandchildren walking into power.
Can you hear our house, actually?
It's important to talk with kids about taking care of the land because the landscape we have today,
I consider it a living feature of our heritage.
They provide us with evidence of how people have interacted with the land over time,
and people will value spaces that are important to them and that you know how to take care of.
So, where can you learn how to take care of trees?
Well, here in Madison, you can go to the Arboretum.
I was there one time recently, and there was just a really simple exhibit that said,
build a nest.
Pretend you're a bird and build a nest with materials at this table.
And there was also a really great exhibit called Ask a Ranger,
and there were questions that were posted and reprinted on the board.
And Rossi said, why do I feel so happy around flowers and trees?
And the ranger answered, flowers and trees are extremely beautiful.
It's hard not to feel so happy.
Scientifically, being out in nature is so good for your health.
There are lots of studies that say, being around plants releases
feel good brain chemicals and reduces stress.
Humans have a deep connection with plants.
In my book, I have a checklist for how you can be a steward for the trees
and be someone that cares for trees.
How can you learn more about logging from the past?
And the book also are a few lots of pages, actually,
about other books that you could read, websites, educational resources,
other outdoor places to explore and places to visit.
This past summer, I went way up to Rice Lake and went to the Luck Library and Museum,
even small historical societies all around the state.
Everyone I've been to has some little exhibit that has to do with logging
because it's an important part of our history and it's something that connects us
as people living in Wisconsin.
At Luck, they had a really cool board scale and explain,
there's that scale that the scale person used to measure the boards on the river
and explain that a board foot measured 12 by 12 inches by one inch thick.
Lots of historical studies have these little models that sort of show
how it looked when you were logging, beautifully made.
We spent a lot of time making a really nice display.
I went to Marinette this past summer, they also have a beautiful logging museum
with a whole giant diorama encased in glass where you can get a feel
for what it was like in a logging camp in the winter.
They have examples of marks and trees and the companies local to that area
and what their logging marks were.
The Marinette Museum also has a huge room with huge machines
that show what might have been in a sawmill.
For example, this is an edger table positioning a board for cutting.
I also went to the Pestigo Museum, which is extremely interesting.
If you haven't been there, you should go.
It's got so much stuff in it and we enjoyed it so much.
It's right next to the cemetery and I feel like it really honors the people
that died as part of the Pestigo fire.
For some reason, I'm super intrigued by these shoes.
I just realized I have lots of pictures of river drive shoes in my talk.
These were hand-made boots that somebody made in order to be a river drive
logger.
Also, there were lots more at the Pestigo Museum, lots of tools.
You can go ahead and look at those tools that were made at the time of logging.
In Wasa, at the Marathon County Historical Society, there's information
about industry from Wasa.
On the bottom picture that shows it's a model of a giant raft that floated
into the wood.
Again, boots with spikes.
Kids today might be familiar with soccer clades or football clades or something.
You can talk about what the clades did.
It's another way to connect with history.
The picture on the left is myself and my brother staring in a tree.
I think we're probably picking out a Christmas tree, but it just shows proof
that even in the past, I've spent a lot of time thinking and looking at trees.
The picture on the top right is my kids and my brother's kids.
We were kind of fooling around in the Rhyme Lander logging museum where they
have a kitchen eating area set up and we just had a lot of fun at that museum.
Thank you for listening to my talk about logging in the past and I would love
for you to continue working with young people to encourage them to care for trees
in our forest lands.
This particular picture, I got to give my brother Steve Apps a plug.
He used to be a photographer for the state journal and he was also the pecker
photographer.
He's got a beautiful website with lots and lots of pictures.
Here are my books.
That's my email.
I got squished up there.
Susan Apps-Bodili at gmail.com and I am a member of the Wisconsin History.org
Speakers Bureau.
That's how you can get ahold of me if you'd like to do a talk for your group
on any of my books.
Any questions or comments about the history of logging or taking care of trees?
That's the end of my talk.
Yes.
Thank you.