The Logging Industry (1900-1920)
By the early twentieth century, western North Carolina’s economy was dominated by two industries: tourism and timber.
However, the early logging industry in western North Carolina has sometimes been overshadowed by its origin story in the American Northeast, where it was initially driven by British interest in what must have seemed to be inexhaustible new-world resources for shipbuilding and naval stores such as pine tar and turpentine.
Camp crew with logging railroad. Courtesy of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC
By the end of the Civil War, though, many areas of the Northeast were logged out; yet lumber was increasingly needed to drive the Industrial Revolution and meet the demands of the burgeoning American economy. It’s no surprise then that wealthy industrialists, who were making their way to North Carolina for leisure, would also be drawn to the opportunities of the timber trade by the rich bio-diversity of hard and soft woods to be found on these virgin grounds.
Early Years
Established in 1861 from sections of Jackson and Henderson counties, Transylvania County was originally and primarily home to subsistence farms in small communities. Transportation was limited to distances capable by horse and oxen due to its mountainous, heavily forested terrain. First settlers felled trees for shelter and fuel, and small sawmill operations existed, but there was no large-scale logging.
Much of the area’s lumber trade occurred between 1900-1920, but most sources agree that the industry began to proliferate in 1895, when the first area railroad — Henderson & Brevard Railroad (later the Transylvania Railroad Company) — came to town. Some also credit the arrival of George Vanderbilt in nearby Asheville and his ambitious build of Biltmore Estate (1889-1895) for piquing interest in the area, first for tourism and then its abundant timber resources.
Three entrepreneurial men were largely responsible for the logging activity which occurred in the Lake Toxaway area: Joseph Silversteen, Louis Carr, and Carl Moltz (they will be explored in detail in a future blog).
Logging camps for these companies and others were soon established across the western forests, with first oxen, then horse teams and local trains moving massive logs, and many of the area towns prospered as a result.
Life in the Logging Camps
For those who might tend to romanticize the past, an 1894 feature in Munsey’s Magazine had this to say about life in the logging camps: “A lake captain, who in his younger days spent several years in the woods, one day remarked to the writer that if he had his choice between spending three months in a lumber camp and the same amount of time in jail, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter.”
The truth is, logging was an often-dangerous occupation involving hard manual labor for long hours at minimal pay. According to David Cole, author of Logging at Forney’s Creek, loggers in the early 1900s earned around sixty-five cents for a ten-hour day. By 1920 wages had risen to about a dollar a day. Other benefits included meals and lodging.
The camps were almost exclusively male, many featuring rustic bunkhouses (typically 10 by 24 feet) which housed as many as 16 men in two-tiered, wooden bunks that lined the outer walls. These structures were often built on skids so they could be easily dismantled and moved whenever it was time to break camp.
Personal property was kept on bunks (or on-person) in a canvas grain bag tied at either end with rope, known as a turkey, sometimes referred to as a crummy (over time, the term crummy morphed into a name for the vehicle taking loggers to a work site).
Men slept in muzzle loaders, bunks so named because they were set so closely together that they had to be crawled into from one end, and typically socialized on a common deacon’s seat that ran the length of the bunkhouse.
Camp kitchens, meanwhile, were large, and food was plentiful though basic: limited meat choices such as salted beef, pork, or fish, as well as soups, stews and gravies; and staples such as vegetables, beans, rice, eggs, oatmeal, grits, pancakes, bread, pastries, and pies. Steeply brewed tea and water were more commonly served than coffee in the early days.
Cooking often fell to women, usually led by the wife of the foreman, but in some camps was also done by men. Cooking for a logging camp demanded stamina and physical strength since items like flour and salt pork were commonly stored in heavy barrels. Kettles and pots were usually cast iron. Camp cooks typically worked over an open fire and had to make most edibles from scratch.
Notably, camp cooks also had to be good cooks or the loggers wouldn’t stay, so they often reigned supreme at camp.
Often, in the interest of keeping the process moving smoothly, no talking was allowed at meals, other than to ask for food to be passed, and most meals were consumed within 12 minutes – a bit incredible, when you consider the loggers were consuming up to 9,000 calories a day in order to stay fueled for their heavy workload. However, this discipline was necessary in order to feed the number of men involved, plus allow time for cookees, the assistants learning the trade, to wash dishes between meals.
Cookees, sometimes known as flunkies, also built fires and delivered meals when the lumber crews were too far from camp to return at noon. The noon meal was one of the largest, but with the coordination involved in all meals, cooking was an all-day affair.
Lumber mill crews and shacks, 1908. Courtesy of the
Rowell Bosse North Carolina Room, Transylvania County Library.
Moltz Lumber worker houses. Courtesy of the Rowell
Bosse North Carolina Room, Transylvania County Library.
Logging Team Lexicon
The logging industry spawned an entirely new lexicon to explain the specialized jobs on logging crews and various activities related to the process.
For instance, forest crews consisted of workers known as choppers, sawyers, and skidders. A chopper (sometimes called a feller) cut initial paths into the forest, marking trees with an axe blade on whatever side he wished to fell them. Sawyers followed after with band saws to cut them down. Limbers severed branches from the felled timber, which the sawyers then cut into logs, a process known as bucking.
Skid, or road, crews were made up of three swampers, one teamster, and three deckers. This team positioned two long pieces of timber about eight feet apart, parallel to each other and at right angles with the road, to create a skidway. Swampers were responsible for trimming logs and clearing underbrush to establish a road. Teamsters (sometimes called bullpunchers or bullwhackers) hauled the logs, usually controlling oxen or horse teams, and deckers rolled them into stacks from four to ten feet high on the skidway. Grease monkeys were in charge of greasing the skids, flumes, and chutes to facilitate log movement when needed.
Buckers hard at work in the forest. Courtesy of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC.
In log drives along waterways, crew members were colloquially known as river rats or river pigs. The drivers typically divided into two groups: the more experienced and nimble men comprised the jam crew, men who stood on the moving logs or ran from one to another; and a larger group of less experienced men called the rear crew pushed along the straggler logs that were stuck on the banks and in trees.
Loggers on the river using peavy hooks. Courtesy of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC.
Limbing logs. Courtesy of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC.
Felling trees. Courtesy of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC.
Greasing the chute. Courtesy of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC.
As you might imagine, both crews were prone to injuries or death from entrapment or drowning, especially in icy water. In the event of an irreconcilable log-jam, the powder monkey – an explosives expert – might be called upon to detonate a charge under the log mass.
In areas where the railroad reached into the camp, whistle punks watched for safety issues and sounded a whistle (usually at the steam donkey, a steam-powered winch or logging engine) as a signal to the yard operator who was controlling the movement of logs onto the rail cars.
These are just a sampling of the colloquial names of the various logging roles. You’ll find many more with a little research!
Below is an excerpt from a wonderful book about the logging camps in Transylvania County, Laurel’s Choices written by Exie Wilde Henson, who happily and proudly based this book on the life of her parents, Joe and Ethel Wilde. Mr. Wilde was the crew boss and Mrs. Wilde was the chief cook, and the main characters in the book are based directly on this intrepid pair. Wilde is also featured on our site for his photographic legacy.
“Snaking out the logs, usually a routine job on level ground, became a dangerous, even deadly, task on a steep slope – especially for the teamster and the horses… The head teamster chained six big logs together, end to end, and hitched them to the horse with a J-grab, a hook that could quickly be released if the logs started to run too fast. [When that happened], the teamster would quickly pull the horse to the side, unhook the J-grab and watch the train of logs rush down the mountainside [hopefully avoiding the swampers below]. After the logs settled, the teamster would go hitch up the horse and start pulling again.
[Using a] chute – or dry flume – down the mountainside got the logs safely to the loading dock. The teamster on the mountain pulled the logs to the edge of the chute – a V-shaped trough – and turned them loose. Then the loaders at the bottom of the chute had the biggest worry – watching out for flying logs. A log could hit a bump and fly thirty or forty feet.”
Another informative book is Yvonne McCall-Dickson’s Transylvania County, a part of the “Images of America” series. It contains some amazing photographs of the loggers, their work and their camps.
Photo published in Transylvania County by Yvonne McCall-Dickson, photographer Joseph Wilde.
Watch the effort required by horses to pull a giant poplar butt log off the mountainside.
Listen to an interview with Sinking Creek Horse Logging owner Ben Harris.
SOURCES:
[1] Life in A Lumber Camp, George Austin Woodward, Munsey’s Magazine, 1884
[2] Logging at Forney’s Creek, David Cole
