Adirondack Timber Cruising
By William J. O’Hern
No longer can hunters hop a ride on the Glenfield-Western “Gee-wiz” railroad on its way to Tug Hill lumbering centers at Page and Michigan Mills.
Prolific Adirondack researcher and writer William J. O’Hern has published yet another book that will delight readers, including those who share his fascination with the old logging days in the Adirondacks and anyone who wants to know what life was like in these parts during the past century and a half.
Barbara Bird and Hazel Todd at Goud Paper Company Camp 7, circa 1920s. Barbara shared all the labors of her forester husband on arduous timer cruising tours and, long winter months in lumber camps.
Adirondack Timber Cruising takes the reader on a journey of many stops. It visits the development of timber cruising, logging, forestry, and our relationship to our physical environment. It shows that conservation is concerned with our spiritual and mental as well as our material welfare. It tells us it is not enough to use forest resources wisely, with the idea that forestry is an end in itself, but that the end is greater human happiness through wise forest management.
Today, selective cutting methods, improved fire protection, more effective insect control, and a better program of reforestation, seek to provide an infinite supply of lumber—a renewable resource adequate to meet the needs of coming generations, while preserving forest lands for recreation and other human needs.
O’Hern’s book overflows with compelling stories about the everyday—but by no means ordinary– people who lived and worked in the timber woods before chainsaws and trucks, and explains how mechanization changed everything. Memories of both famous and nameless loggers and others who worked in the lumber camps and towns populate the pages as the reader cruises to the end of an era that will never be forgotten.
And there’s a bonus—hundreds of vintage photographs make this a two-in-one book, with a wide array of eyewitness pictures accompanying the stories.
Forester Bob Daws (2012) displays a scaling stick, map and scaler’s crayon holder— tools of his timber cruising days.
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Log skidder pulls a twitch of logs. Foresters and loggers share to some degree the unpleasantness of weather that comes with the beauty of an Adirondack winter.
Background photo: An early Linn tractor draws sleigh loads of log.
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