TIMBER HARVESTING

​Oliver Johnson. "Timber Harvesting," In The Midst Of, Cokato Historical Society (Winter, 1992) vol. 12 no. 1.

The Cokato area was almost in the heart of the region in Minnesota which was known as the Big Woods. It was a triangular area which started a bit northwest of St. Cloud, extended south to the Minnesota River, east to the Mississippi River, and then went diagonally back to a point which was a little northeast of St. Cloud. The timber in this area consisted of hardwoods such as oak, ash, elm, maple, butternut, hickory, basswood, etc. The Big Woods area was surrounded by prairie on the south and west, and mainly coniferous trees to the north and east.

​My father often talked about the many sawmills in the area. The native lumber was used extensively for buildings at first. Later the railroad provided a market for railroad ties and maple cordwood to fire the steam locomotive. My father told of hauling cordwood with oxen to Smith Lake where the trains would take on the cordwood for fuel and the farmers would earn a few dollars. I believe he said they earned one dollar for a cord of hard maple.

​I vividly remember pulling the crosscut saw with my father at the age of ten and on. After felling a tree, it had to be limbed. My father was extremely skillful at handling an ax. Then we would measure the length of the log that would be used for lumber. The length would be determined by the useable length of the trunk of the tree. Lengths would usually range from six feet to eighteen feet. The limbs would be salvaged for firewood. Other residue material would be piled into a brush pile which would be burned after it had dried a few months. Our next project was to rack the firewood. Later this would be sawed into lengths that the stove could accommodate.

My father began carving our present farmland out of the Big Woods in 1920. To do so required a lot of patience and hard work. There was a time when my father had three sawmills on our farm. First, the huge trees were felled and trimmed. Then the logs would be skidded with a team of horses and piled near the sawmill. The skidding was usually done while there was snow on the ground to avoid dirt from lodging in the bark. Dirt or pebbles would dull the saw when sawing lumber.

Even the sawdust was useful. Many farmers had ice houses where the sawdust packed around the ice cakes would preserve them from melting and sticking together. The stumps, too, had to be removed. There were various ways of doing this. My father used an ax, a shovel, a grub hoe, and a long pry to remove the stumps. If they proved to be too tough, he would plow around them and give them a few years time to rot.

Even today there are many uses for hardwoods. Oak and ash are in great demand for cabinet making, other furniture, flooring, doors, and window sashes. Basswood is excellent for wood sculpturing. Many homes are still heated with wood today.