The Men Who Cut the Mountains

An installment in our Appalachian History and Culture series.

Logging crew gathered beside railroad tracks and camp buildings — Industrial logging required a workforce that extended far beyond the men who felled the trees. Camps like this one moved workers close to the timber.

The Farmer Goes to the Woods

Not every man who went into the Appalachian woods to cut timber was a logger by trade. Some were farmers who left their own land seasonally because the timber companies offered something a small farm did not always provide: cash.

That money had practical uses. It could pay land taxes or other debts. It could buy manufactured goods that couldn’t be produced on the farm. For a man accustomed to earning much of his living from his own land, a season in the woods could supplement what the farm provided without requiring him to give it up.

But the logging workforce was never made up entirely of local farmers. Large operations also attracted migrant laborers and skilled workers who moved from one timber tract to another. Experienced sawyers worked alongside locomotive engineers, trackmen, and men who understood the increasingly complex machinery entering the woods. Some made logging their livelihood rather than seasonal work.

For the local farmer, industrial logging introduced a different kind of working life. On his own place, the day’s work followed the demands of crops, animals, and weather. In a company logging operation, a foreman assigned the work, and the day followed a company schedule, sometimes announced by a whistle. The farmer had become a wage worker, at least for part of the year.

Whatever brought a man into the woods, getting hired was only the beginning. The work required strength.

A strong man could swing an axe or pull a saw, but the woods rewarded the man who knew where to cut, when to move, and how to keep himself and the men beside him alive.

Two loggers using a crosscut saw to fell a large tree — Felling a large tree required more than strength. Saw partners had to understand the tree, their tools, and the rhythm of the man working opposite them.

Knowing How to Drop a Tree

Felling a large tree took more than putting a saw against the trunk and pulling.

Before the cutting began, experienced fallers studied the tree. They looked at the direction it leaned, the weight of its crown, and signs of rot that might make it behave unpredictably. The fallers also studied the ground, choosing a place where the tree could come down without trapping the trunk, blocking the crew, or sending men scrambling beneath its weight.

The fallers first chopped an undercut into the side of the trunk facing the intended direction of fall. Then two men worked a crosscut saw from the opposite side. As the cut deepened, wedges driven behind the blade helped keep the tree’s weight from pinching the saw and gave the fallers some added control over the direction of the fall.

Working a crosscut was a skill of its own. The partners had to establish a rhythm, each pulling the long blade toward himself in turn. Pushing could buckle the saw rather than move it cleanly through the wood. A good partnership depended on each man knowing what the other was doing without stopping to discuss every movement.

All the while, the tree was changing. As the final wood began to give way, the men had to recognize what was happening and get clear. At the end of the cut, judgment meant hearing the first crack, reading the shift in the trunk, and stepping clear before the tree, a split trunk, or falling limbs could catch a man in the wrong place.

Strength and endurance were part of the job, but neither was enough by itself. A skilled faller had to understand his tools, the tree in front of him, and the man working the other end of the saw.

And once the tree hit the ground, the work had only begun.

Mill worker handling large logs beside mechanical lifting equipment — Mechanization changed logging work without eliminating the worker. Moving and handling heavy timber still depended on men who knew how to work around it.

Nobody Cut a Mountain Alone

Before the tree could become lumber, the trunk had to move from where it fell to a landing, railroad, or mill. That required another set of workers and skills.

Workers removed the limbs and cut the trunk into manageable log lengths. Teamsters then used horses, mules, or oxen to move the logs along skid trails. Handling a draft team on steep mountain ground required more than getting the animals to pull. The teamster had to control both animals and heavy logs while negotiating uneven terrain.

Mechanization brought other specialties into the woods. Riggers and chokermen worked with steam-powered cable skidders that could pull logs from slopes difficult for animal teams to reach. Trackmen built and moved temporary rail lines as the cutting advanced. Engineers and firemen ran the geared locomotives that carried the logs out.

Even the crosscut saw depended on someone beyond the two men pulling it. Keeping those long blades properly filed and set was skilled work of its own. Larger operations employed saw filers to maintain the cutting teeth and keep the blades working properly.

Each job connected to the next. Fallers brought down the tree. Other workers prepared and moved the logs. Railroad crews carried them toward the mill.

Industrial logging had brought powerful machinery into the mountains, but machinery hadn’t ended the need for skilled workers. Instead, it created more ways for one man’s work to depend upon another man’s.

For many of those men, the logging operation also determined where they lived.

Timber company workers gathered beside railroad tracks at a logging camp — Logging could create a world beyond the day’s work, with camps and settlements built around an industry that would eventually move on.

Work Followed Them Home

For some loggers, the working day ended in a camp built for men who would eventually move on.

Remote operations used bunkhouses, rough wooden shanties, and sometimes rail cars converted into living quarters. These car camps could move along the tracks as cutting advanced into another hollow. They suited an industry always working toward the next stand of timber.

Around the large sawmills, however, a different kind of community could develop.

Companies built frame houses for workers and their families. A company store might supply food and household goods, while schools and churches served families living around the mill. Women managed households and sometimes took in unmarried workers as boarders. Children went to school and grew up with the mill yard and railroad as part of their surroundings.

A bunkhouse beside a temporary logging line was built for a transient workforce. A mill settlement could begin to look much more permanent.

People lived there. Children grew up there. Daily life extended well beyond the whistle that began and ended the working day.

Yet the houses, school, store, and mill all depended on enough timber within reach to keep the operation going.

Every tree the men cut brought the operation closer to the day when the work would have to move somewhere else.

Sawmill workers standing beside machinery inside a lumber mill — The men who cut the mountains didn’t all work in the woods. Mill crews turned the logs arriving from the forest into usable lumber.

When the Work Moved On

Eventually, the cutting reached the end of the tract.

For a logging company, that meant looking toward the next source of timber. Equipment could be moved. Mill machinery could be dismantled and loaded onto rail cars. Track crews could pull up temporary rails for use somewhere else.

The workers faced a different problem.

A man who had spent years moving from one logging operation to another might simply look for the next job. Skilled workers could sometimes follow a company to another operation. Others found different work or returned to farming.

For families set up in a mill town, leaving meant more than changing jobs. Their houses, neighbors, schools, and churches were where the timber happened to be when the company built the mill. Once the surrounding forests could no longer support the operation, the reason for the town’s existence began to disappear. Stores could close. Houses emptied. Some settlements survived in diminished form while others largely disappeared.

There was a hard logic to it. Logging had brought cash wages and industrial jobs into mountain communities. In some places, it had helped create communities of its own. But the industry depended upon a resource that could be exhausted one tract at a time.

The men who cut the mountains lived inside that contradiction.

They followed the timber into the woods. And when the last commercially useful trees were gone, the work moved again.

For many of the men who depended on it, there was only one practical choice.

They followed the work.

More Appalachian History & Culture
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