The logging days of yore inspired a fair amount of poetry and prose that perhaps romanticize a dangerous trade. You can hear the romance of the log drive in Adirondack author Florence Western’s verses “The Passing of the Log Drive: Dedicated to Those Who Were a Part of It.”

By the time Western’s poem was published in the spring, 1961 edition of North Country Life magazine, the great river drives had vanished. The old-time lumberjack and his log drives were things of the past like westward expansion. Commercial logging began in Michigan in 1832, when the upper half of the lower peninsula and the upper peninsula remained one vast wilderness as the southern part was being settled. By 1870, the giant white pines in the lower peninsula had been cut down, giving way to farms, universities, manufacturing towns, railroads, paved roads, and golf courses. As settlers migrated west and needed lumber for houses and other buildings, logging went with them. While the average loggers were not paid a lot, they built fortunes for the “timber kings” who owned the companies and mills.

Another source for information about these early days: Adirondack Author Thomas C. O’Donnell, who cataloged 1928 newspaper reports of the last of the great white pine log drives that were finished in the upper peninsula of Michigan in the early 20th century. If you are interested in reading O’Donnell’s tales of the old log drives, check out his book Birth of a River, Tip of the Hill, and The River Rolls On. O’Donnell chronicles how nearly 2,500,000 feet of logs came down the Manistique River; when the drive was finished, lumbermen said Michigan had seen the last of the really large-scale affairs of that kind. Thus, another lost bit of the old frontier passed on.

The spring log drive offered some real money to the men who braved the whitewater and in doing their job furnished excitement for themselves and for onlookers. The now-vanished drives were certainly, in the eyes of many, the “good old days.” Logging itself remains a very viable industry today, although the methods have changed greatly. The thrill of the old days – what inspired poetry and prose in equal measure – is perhaps gone forever.

“Above the Bridge-Dam on the Hudson River, the water was covered with floating logs which the log divers were guiding toward the sluice way through which a torrent of water and logs were pouring.”—W.B Downey, Sky Pilot

COURTESY MAITLAND C. DESORMO