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When the White Pine Was King: A History of Lumberjacks, Log Drives, and Sawdust Cities in Wisconsin
“From the ring of the ax in the woods, to the scream of the saw blade in the mill, to the founding of many of Wisconsin’s communities, Jerry Apps does an outstanding job bringing Wisconsin’s logging and lumbering heritage to life.”—Kerry P. Bloedorn, director, Rhinelander Pioneer Park Historical Complex
For more than half a century, logging, lumber production, and affiliated enterprises in Wisconsin’s Northwoods provided jobs for tens of thousands of Wisconsinites and wealth for many individuals. The industry cut through the lives of nearly every Wisconsin citizen, from an immigrant lumberjack or camp cook in the Chippewa Valley to a Suamico sawmill operator, an Oshkosh factory worker to a Milwaukee banker.
When the White Pine Was King tells the stories of the heyday of of lumberjacks and camp cooks, of river drives and deadly log jams, of sawmills and lumber towns and the echo of the ax ringing through the Northwoods as yet another white pine crashed to the ground. He explores the aftermath of the logging era, including efforts to farm the cutover (most of them doomed to fail), successful reforestation work, and the legacy of the lumber and wood products industries, which continue to fuel the state’s economy.
Enhanced with dozens of historic photos, When the White Pine Was King transports readers to the lumber boom era and reveals how the lessons learned in the vast northern forestlands continue to shape the region today.
For more than half a century, logging, lumber production, and affiliated enterprises in Wisconsin’s Northwoods provided jobs for tens of thousands of Wisconsinites and wealth for many individuals. The industry cut through the lives of nearly every Wisconsin citizen, from an immigrant lumberjack or camp cook in the Chippewa Valley to a Suamico sawmill operator, an Oshkosh factory worker to a Milwaukee banker.
When the White Pine Was King tells the stories of the heyday of of lumberjacks and camp cooks, of river drives and deadly log jams, of sawmills and lumber towns and the echo of the ax ringing through the Northwoods as yet another white pine crashed to the ground. He explores the aftermath of the logging era, including efforts to farm the cutover (most of them doomed to fail), successful reforestation work, and the legacy of the lumber and wood products industries, which continue to fuel the state’s economy.
Enhanced with dozens of historic photos, When the White Pine Was King transports readers to the lumber boom era and reveals how the lessons learned in the vast northern forestlands continue to shape the region today.
192 pages, Paperback
Published August 21, 2020
20 people are currently reading
142 people want to read
About the author
Jerry Apps
96 books89 followersJerold W. Apps, born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of more than 30 books, many of them on rural history and country life. His nonfiction books include: Living a Country Year, Every Farm Tells a Story, When Chores Were Done, Humor from the Country, Country Ways and Country Days, One-Room Schools, Cheese, Breweries of Wisconsin, Ringlingville USA (History of Ringling Brothers circus), Old Farm: A History, Barns of Wisconsin, Horse Drawn Days: A Century of Farming With Horses, and Campfires and Loon Calls. His children's books include: Stormy, Eat Rutabagas, Tents, Tigers and the Ringling Brothers, and Casper Jaggi: Master Swiss Cheese Maker. He has an audio book, The Back Porch and Other Stories. Jerry has published four novels, The Travels of Increase Joseph, In a Pickle: A Family Farm Story, Blue Shadows Farm and Cranberry Red. Jerry is a former publications editor for UW-Extension, an acquisitions editor for the McGraw-Hill Book Company, and editor of a national professional journal.
Jerry has won awards for his writing from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Library Association (the 2007 Notable Authors Award), American Library Association, Foreword Magazine, Midwest Independent Publishers Association, Robert E. Gard Foundation, The Wisconsin Council for Writers (the 2007 Major Achievement Award), Upper Midwest Booksellers, and Barnes and Noble Bookstores, among others. In 2010 he received the Distinguished Service Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Check www.jerryapps.com for more information.
Jerry has won awards for his writing from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Library Association (the 2007 Notable Authors Award), American Library Association, Foreword Magazine, Midwest Independent Publishers Association, Robert E. Gard Foundation, The Wisconsin Council for Writers (the 2007 Major Achievement Award), Upper Midwest Booksellers, and Barnes and Noble Bookstores, among others. In 2010 he received the Distinguished Service Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Check www.jerryapps.com for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 10, 2020
Always interesting and well written books by local author. Lots of pictures.
October 27, 2020
Anyone living or visiting the Northwoods of Wisconsin can see the importance of the forests and trees, but not many know the history of logging and lumberjacks in the state. From scouting the woods to life in a sawmill town, Jerry Apps' "When the White Pine was King" provides a thorough and detailed history of logging in the state of Wisconsin, and the many historical photos throughout the book supplement the historical commentary.
Not only does Apps cover the process of logging from start to finish, but includes background of prominent figures in the industry and interviews with descendents of those figures. According to Apps, "Until about 1900, Wisconsin's logging and lumberjacks industries employed more workers than any other manufacturing industry in the state," and it was during these booming times that many villages and cities were built up, as much of the population depended on the industry for employment.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Wisconsin history.
Not only does Apps cover the process of logging from start to finish, but includes background of prominent figures in the industry and interviews with descendents of those figures. According to Apps, "Until about 1900, Wisconsin's logging and lumberjacks industries employed more workers than any other manufacturing industry in the state," and it was during these booming times that many villages and cities were built up, as much of the population depended on the industry for employment.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Wisconsin history.
December 4, 2020
The past few summers my family has spent a week or so in Vilas County. The county lies along the northern edge of Wisconsin—any further and you are in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The total population of Vilas County is 22,000. It has towns like Eagle River and Boulder Junction, but towns are mostly beside the point. What’s important are the hundreds of small lakes. The shores of these lakes are the sites for vacation cabins, resorts, and youth camps. To Wisconsinites who live in the more populous southern half of the state, Vilas County is part of a region that gets referred to as “Up North.”
The appeal of Wisconsin’s Northwoods lies in a common set of assumptions about vacation and city life. Getting in a car and heading to a rented cabin feels like a chance to slough off the city and get back to nature. It’s obviously not wilderness in some pristine sense, but it feels as if large scale economic development just never reached the area. But there were always signs that this wasn’t the correct reading of this region. Driving through Minocqua on the way up to Vilas County we always pass Paul Bunyan’s Famous Cook Shanty, a restaurant with a huge fiberglass statue of the lumberjack and his blue ox out front. And when I walk around the grounds of the historic Camp Manitowish (opened in 1919), as we drop off our daughter for a summer session, I’m struck by hints of logging. The camp celebrates Paul and Pauline Bunyan day, and a relic logging cart is marked on the grounds. A popular memory of logging survives in these spaces. In addition the more we hike the area, the more it becomes obvious that no old growth forests remain, and it begins to sink in: this whole area was thoroughly logged before it became a vacation land. Vilas County was in the heart of the great forest that covered the northern parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. In the course of about 50 years it was cut over; fortunes were made by the logging corporations who had acquired the land cheaply and employed lumberjack crews to clear cut all of it. The camps and cabins of this vacationland represent a kind of second growth, a reimagining of the decimated cutover.
This raised a question I couldn’t get out of my mind: what did this forest look like before it was clear cut? Were there eye-witness accounts of walking in the old growth forests? I thought I’d take a look at accounts of the loggers who came to the Northwoods, and I was pleased to learn that the Wisconsin Historical Society had published When the White Pine Was King this same year. The book promised to be an overview of the history of logging in the state, and I began the book in hopes of glimpsing, even at second hand, that great old growth forest.
The book was squarely centered on the life that came into existence around loggers. Crews of loggers cut their way through sections of the northwoods each winter, and then ran those logs down the rivers to waiting sawmills. Many of these lumberjacks lived on farms in the lower half of Wisconsin, and spent their winters cutting and hauling. As might be expected when thousands of young men participate year over year in an industry that demanded close-knit work, a subculture developed. Jerry Apps presents photos from the Wisconsin Historical Society archive and describes camp life and the entire process of getting the logs downriver. He also examines men like German immigrant Frederick Weyerhaeuser who built massive lumber empires in the course of the 19th century. The lumber business was instrumental in the establishment of most of the larger cities in the northern part of Wisconsin: La Crosse, Eau Claire, Wausau, Oshkosh, Marinette, Stevens Point, etc. Once the land of northern Wisconsin was acquired from the Native American tribes whose land it had been, its settlement and civic layout were effected by means of the fifty-year labor of erasing its old growth forests.
But the forests themselves are largely absent from this book. There is a chapter at the end that reflects on the brute reality of the “cutover,” and I found an understated force in a sentence like this one: “The industry removed virtually all of Wisconsin’s northern forests in the span of fifty years, leaving behind hundreds of square miles of stumps and slash.” What more is there to add? The world of the loggers is a worthy subject for history, but it was a labor erased for all time the possibility of others to experience the life of old growth forests.
Whatever the social bonds built by lumberjacks, they were not as a class given to reflection on the forest. There was no poet of the northwoods who saw what was being lost and tried to document it. The most lasting representation of this natural world can be found in the tales that gathered around Paul Bunyan. In Out of the Northwoods: The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan, historian Michael Edmonds places the genesis of these stories in the northwoods of Wisconsin. One of the figures associated with early tellings of Bunyan tales was a man named Eugene Shepard (1854-1923) who surveyed parts of the Northwoods, including Vilas County, for the lumber companies. The bigness of the exploits of Paul Bunyan reflects the old growth forests, which must have beggared the imagination and in the process called forth this larger than life character who could be imagined to master it. Those early tales betray an authentic feeling.
The experience of one lumberjack was captured in the 1950s. Louie Blanchard had spent his youth, from 1888-1912, working in the lumber camps, and apparently he was ready to talk because he delivered a colorful narrative published as The Lumberjack Frontier in 1969. He recounted stories about camp life, covering much of the same ground as When the White Pine Was King. I didn’t find much about the forests in this book either, but there was this at the start: “Right here where my farm is was once covered by trees so thick and so tall that you couldn’t see the sun when you looked up through the branches.” It sounds like the start of a tall tale, but it was a fact. Somewhat later comes a note of regret: “They left behind a sorry-looking land: miles of stumps and brush...” And then comes reflection on responsibility: “The government shouldn’t have let them them companies take off the little trees that wouldn’t make anything bigger than a two by four. Us loggers thought the big woods would last forever.” Government, companies, loggers: they gleefully cut those big woods down.
The appeal of Wisconsin’s Northwoods lies in a common set of assumptions about vacation and city life. Getting in a car and heading to a rented cabin feels like a chance to slough off the city and get back to nature. It’s obviously not wilderness in some pristine sense, but it feels as if large scale economic development just never reached the area. But there were always signs that this wasn’t the correct reading of this region. Driving through Minocqua on the way up to Vilas County we always pass Paul Bunyan’s Famous Cook Shanty, a restaurant with a huge fiberglass statue of the lumberjack and his blue ox out front. And when I walk around the grounds of the historic Camp Manitowish (opened in 1919), as we drop off our daughter for a summer session, I’m struck by hints of logging. The camp celebrates Paul and Pauline Bunyan day, and a relic logging cart is marked on the grounds. A popular memory of logging survives in these spaces. In addition the more we hike the area, the more it becomes obvious that no old growth forests remain, and it begins to sink in: this whole area was thoroughly logged before it became a vacation land. Vilas County was in the heart of the great forest that covered the northern parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. In the course of about 50 years it was cut over; fortunes were made by the logging corporations who had acquired the land cheaply and employed lumberjack crews to clear cut all of it. The camps and cabins of this vacationland represent a kind of second growth, a reimagining of the decimated cutover.
This raised a question I couldn’t get out of my mind: what did this forest look like before it was clear cut? Were there eye-witness accounts of walking in the old growth forests? I thought I’d take a look at accounts of the loggers who came to the Northwoods, and I was pleased to learn that the Wisconsin Historical Society had published When the White Pine Was King this same year. The book promised to be an overview of the history of logging in the state, and I began the book in hopes of glimpsing, even at second hand, that great old growth forest.
The book was squarely centered on the life that came into existence around loggers. Crews of loggers cut their way through sections of the northwoods each winter, and then ran those logs down the rivers to waiting sawmills. Many of these lumberjacks lived on farms in the lower half of Wisconsin, and spent their winters cutting and hauling. As might be expected when thousands of young men participate year over year in an industry that demanded close-knit work, a subculture developed. Jerry Apps presents photos from the Wisconsin Historical Society archive and describes camp life and the entire process of getting the logs downriver. He also examines men like German immigrant Frederick Weyerhaeuser who built massive lumber empires in the course of the 19th century. The lumber business was instrumental in the establishment of most of the larger cities in the northern part of Wisconsin: La Crosse, Eau Claire, Wausau, Oshkosh, Marinette, Stevens Point, etc. Once the land of northern Wisconsin was acquired from the Native American tribes whose land it had been, its settlement and civic layout were effected by means of the fifty-year labor of erasing its old growth forests.
But the forests themselves are largely absent from this book. There is a chapter at the end that reflects on the brute reality of the “cutover,” and I found an understated force in a sentence like this one: “The industry removed virtually all of Wisconsin’s northern forests in the span of fifty years, leaving behind hundreds of square miles of stumps and slash.” What more is there to add? The world of the loggers is a worthy subject for history, but it was a labor erased for all time the possibility of others to experience the life of old growth forests.
Whatever the social bonds built by lumberjacks, they were not as a class given to reflection on the forest. There was no poet of the northwoods who saw what was being lost and tried to document it. The most lasting representation of this natural world can be found in the tales that gathered around Paul Bunyan. In Out of the Northwoods: The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan, historian Michael Edmonds places the genesis of these stories in the northwoods of Wisconsin. One of the figures associated with early tellings of Bunyan tales was a man named Eugene Shepard (1854-1923) who surveyed parts of the Northwoods, including Vilas County, for the lumber companies. The bigness of the exploits of Paul Bunyan reflects the old growth forests, which must have beggared the imagination and in the process called forth this larger than life character who could be imagined to master it. Those early tales betray an authentic feeling.
The experience of one lumberjack was captured in the 1950s. Louie Blanchard had spent his youth, from 1888-1912, working in the lumber camps, and apparently he was ready to talk because he delivered a colorful narrative published as The Lumberjack Frontier in 1969. He recounted stories about camp life, covering much of the same ground as When the White Pine Was King. I didn’t find much about the forests in this book either, but there was this at the start: “Right here where my farm is was once covered by trees so thick and so tall that you couldn’t see the sun when you looked up through the branches.” It sounds like the start of a tall tale, but it was a fact. Somewhat later comes a note of regret: “They left behind a sorry-looking land: miles of stumps and brush...” And then comes reflection on responsibility: “The government shouldn’t have let them them companies take off the little trees that wouldn’t make anything bigger than a two by four. Us loggers thought the big woods would last forever.” Government, companies, loggers: they gleefully cut those big woods down.
May 27, 2022
Explorers chart wildernesses and politicians draw boundaries, but businesses and industries build communities. “When The White Pine Was King” is the story of the transformative role the logging industry played in shaping communities and the economy of early Wisconsin.
The narrative begins with an introduction of the author’s association with Wisconsin’s logging heritage. It continues with accounts of how the glaciers shaped Wisconsin and the Indian nations and early explorers adapted to it. Wisconsin’s climate and soil set the stage for massive forests of white pine that was superior that the stands in other states. The forests attracted skilled loggers from New England and Canada’s Maritime provinces. Author Jerry Apps guides the readers through Wisconsin’s logging tales, both chronologically and by subject. He narrates the sagas of the techniques of cutting, transporting and processing the logs, the lumberjack’s camps and life, the sawmills and life in the sawmill towns.
Beginning well before the Civil War, Wisconsin logging reached its peak around 1890 after which it commenced a long decline. As harvestable timber was exhausted, many companies moved into other regions, leaving behind baren wastelands, although some sought to convert to sustainable planting and cutting. Attempts to convert abandoned forests to farmland predictably failed due to climate and soil quality. Eventually, reforestation was adopted as the only profitable use of the land.
This is another in Jerry Apps’ extensive canon focusing on Wisconsin history and memory. Unlike some authors who tell a story through essentially independently standing anecdotes, Apps again exhibits his ability to weave the stories of individuals, the rise and decline of communities, the business practices that directed an industry and its place in the American Pageant into a readable, informative and enjoyable tome. He chronicles the reasons logging and milling took place when and where the did. He highlights some of the giants who built their businesses, such as Frederick Weyerhaeuser. He confronts the reader with concept that “Ecologically, no force since the glaciers has rivaled northern logging in either its immediate or long-term effects.” (p. 116) The photos and notes supplement the text and the sidebars provide snippets of characters, lore and context that enhance the tales.
“When The White Pine Was King” is a treasure. I have read several of Jerry Apps’ books and my favorite has been “Wisconsin Agriculture” (see my review) for its saga of farming’s contribution to the building of the Dairy State. “White Pine” is similar, though shorter, and is a strong contender for my blue ribbon. I recommend it to anyone interested in the role of logging in building of civilizations in Northern Wisconsin or similar regions elsewhere on the continent.
I did receive a free copy of this book without an obligation to post a review.
The narrative begins with an introduction of the author’s association with Wisconsin’s logging heritage. It continues with accounts of how the glaciers shaped Wisconsin and the Indian nations and early explorers adapted to it. Wisconsin’s climate and soil set the stage for massive forests of white pine that was superior that the stands in other states. The forests attracted skilled loggers from New England and Canada’s Maritime provinces. Author Jerry Apps guides the readers through Wisconsin’s logging tales, both chronologically and by subject. He narrates the sagas of the techniques of cutting, transporting and processing the logs, the lumberjack’s camps and life, the sawmills and life in the sawmill towns.
Beginning well before the Civil War, Wisconsin logging reached its peak around 1890 after which it commenced a long decline. As harvestable timber was exhausted, many companies moved into other regions, leaving behind baren wastelands, although some sought to convert to sustainable planting and cutting. Attempts to convert abandoned forests to farmland predictably failed due to climate and soil quality. Eventually, reforestation was adopted as the only profitable use of the land.
This is another in Jerry Apps’ extensive canon focusing on Wisconsin history and memory. Unlike some authors who tell a story through essentially independently standing anecdotes, Apps again exhibits his ability to weave the stories of individuals, the rise and decline of communities, the business practices that directed an industry and its place in the American Pageant into a readable, informative and enjoyable tome. He chronicles the reasons logging and milling took place when and where the did. He highlights some of the giants who built their businesses, such as Frederick Weyerhaeuser. He confronts the reader with concept that “Ecologically, no force since the glaciers has rivaled northern logging in either its immediate or long-term effects.” (p. 116) The photos and notes supplement the text and the sidebars provide snippets of characters, lore and context that enhance the tales.
“When The White Pine Was King” is a treasure. I have read several of Jerry Apps’ books and my favorite has been “Wisconsin Agriculture” (see my review) for its saga of farming’s contribution to the building of the Dairy State. “White Pine” is similar, though shorter, and is a strong contender for my blue ribbon. I recommend it to anyone interested in the role of logging in building of civilizations in Northern Wisconsin or similar regions elsewhere on the continent.
I did receive a free copy of this book without an obligation to post a review.
October 24, 2022
Apps gives a great account of Wisconsin’s vast pine lands that were tapped into in the mid nineteenth-century and were tapped out by the turn of the twentieth. There were futile efforts to transform the cutover areas into farmland, but reforestation and recreation helped save Northern Wisconsin.
“…lumber companies had taken their money, their jobs, and influence and moved to other places where there were trees to cut and money to be made.”
Apps gives the reader a little sample of everything of the lumber industry—camp life, moving the logs on the rivers, mill towns, lumber leaders, ecological issues, reforestation, etc. He also shows how the state has rebounded and has made a comeback in the industry but with more conservation and selective harvesting practices used.
Beware, I did find some factual errors in his work. He talks about the 1875 fire in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which destroyed much of the business district and several firms. Apps indicated that one of the owners of Morgan & Brother Mill died while trying to put out the fire that started in their lumber yard. This information is incorrect—it was actually an employee at the mill that perished attempting to put the fire out.
“…lumber companies had taken their money, their jobs, and influence and moved to other places where there were trees to cut and money to be made.”
Apps gives the reader a little sample of everything of the lumber industry—camp life, moving the logs on the rivers, mill towns, lumber leaders, ecological issues, reforestation, etc. He also shows how the state has rebounded and has made a comeback in the industry but with more conservation and selective harvesting practices used.
Beware, I did find some factual errors in his work. He talks about the 1875 fire in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which destroyed much of the business district and several firms. Apps indicated that one of the owners of Morgan & Brother Mill died while trying to put out the fire that started in their lumber yard. This information is incorrect—it was actually an employee at the mill that perished attempting to put the fire out.
September 30, 2021
Every time I read something by Wisconsin author Jerry Apps, I learn something, but I feel like I am being transported to another time. “When the White Pine Was King” provides a history of Wisconsin’s timber industry. We learn about the “rugged life in primitive logging camps” where trees were cut down and sent down the river to paper mills. It was an industry that drove Wisconsin’s economy for decades.
Wisconsin had an ample supply of white pine which was popular during the nation’s housing boom. We saw the first surge of the timber industry from 1850 to 1856, and while it slowed after the economic panic of 1857, it had regained strength by 1860. The Civil war boosts demand for Wisconsin lumber.
The first commercial sawmills were located on Wisconsin’s rivers. Logs were sent streaming down the waterways or rafted together.
Another boom period began in 1866 when the US government released tracts of surveyed land for sale. Wisconsin gained ownership of 240,000 acres, and the state’s legislature ensured that the proceeds benefited the University of Wisconsin.
We read stories of the difficult work of the loggers. But even after a long, dangerous day, the men were not allowed to drink in the logging camps because “some men never knew when to quit and became drunk, violent and abusive.”
But good things do come to an end, and by the early 1900s, it was becoming clear that the white pine woodlands were being depleted. Towns and cities that once depended on the industry began ‘drying up, and people started leaving.”
In 1933, the Wisconsin Conservation Corps planted more than two million trees in county forests. While the industry never regained its previous glory.
In 2019, the author shared that Wisconsin’s 35 million acres of land include 49 percent of forest land. Of that, 10.4 million are owned by individuals and families, with the rest owned by corporations, the state, federal or local governments. The predominant tree species now include the sugar maple, red maple, and the northern red oak.
Wisconsin had an ample supply of white pine which was popular during the nation’s housing boom. We saw the first surge of the timber industry from 1850 to 1856, and while it slowed after the economic panic of 1857, it had regained strength by 1860. The Civil war boosts demand for Wisconsin lumber.
The first commercial sawmills were located on Wisconsin’s rivers. Logs were sent streaming down the waterways or rafted together.
Another boom period began in 1866 when the US government released tracts of surveyed land for sale. Wisconsin gained ownership of 240,000 acres, and the state’s legislature ensured that the proceeds benefited the University of Wisconsin.
We read stories of the difficult work of the loggers. But even after a long, dangerous day, the men were not allowed to drink in the logging camps because “some men never knew when to quit and became drunk, violent and abusive.”
But good things do come to an end, and by the early 1900s, it was becoming clear that the white pine woodlands were being depleted. Towns and cities that once depended on the industry began ‘drying up, and people started leaving.”
In 1933, the Wisconsin Conservation Corps planted more than two million trees in county forests. While the industry never regained its previous glory.
In 2019, the author shared that Wisconsin’s 35 million acres of land include 49 percent of forest land. Of that, 10.4 million are owned by individuals and families, with the rest owned by corporations, the state, federal or local governments. The predominant tree species now include the sugar maple, red maple, and the northern red oak.
October 28, 2020
Growing up near a town created by a lumber company and currently living in a city that was the lumber capitol of the world, I knew a lot of this info, but I had to read this great book by my friend Jerry. I worked with him at my previous job, and when I left, he'd tease me by saying "A good farm girl gone bad." : )
March 7, 2022
A very interesting history of my home area during the height of the logging era. It kept my interest and answered a number of questions about that time. The photos were a nice addition and the book left me with an interest in visiting one of the logging museums mentioned.
May 21, 2023
When the White Pine Was King, Jerry Apps, 2020, 184 pages, ISBN 9780870209345, Dewey 338.1749809775
Lots of good photos from the 1880s to 1910s.
One-quarter of Wisconsin workers in the 1890s were in logging and lumber. p. 14.
A board foot is 12 inches by 12 inches by 1 inch. p. 11.
Lots of good photos from the 1880s to 1910s.
One-quarter of Wisconsin workers in the 1890s were in logging and lumber. p. 14.
A board foot is 12 inches by 12 inches by 1 inch. p. 11.
November 14, 2023
I read this mainly for research for a book I’m writing, but it’s also a book I’d absolutely read. And I loved it! It did have some moments of oddly conservative rhetoric that delved into almost fanatic territory, but those were overshadowed by a generally great book.
July 22, 2024
Easy reading. Overview of the early lumber industry development to its demise. Also covered were the programs to assist with returning the land to forests or farmland and conservation efforts and land reclamation.
December 30, 2020
As usual for Apps, this was a very well-crafted book. The logging history of Wisconsin is rich and story-filled. Jerry Apps is one of my favorite Wisconsin authors, and this book does not disappoint!
January 17, 2021
A really interesting look at the history of our state. Highly recommend!
March 24, 2021
This book contains all you'd ever want to know about the logging industry in Wisconsin. It was well-researched and fascinating.
December 28, 2021
A well-researched read about lumberjacks in the great north of Wisconsin.
November 2, 2024
I really enjoyed this book. I would have enjoyed more detail and personal histories but I thought it was a good overview.
November 23, 2020
Easy reading. Overview of the early lumber industry development to its demise. Also covered were the programs to assist with returning the land to forests or farmland and conservation efforts and land reclamation.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews