A lumberjack is a special breed of a man, harvesting timber from the land, he does his job with hard work and pride. He has to be alert to stay alive. A logger work clothes is not a three piece suit, it is a hard hat, snagged of jeans and caulk boots.
These series of lumberjacks photos shows the hard work that loggers do during the beginning of 20th century. Staying away from their families and toiling thorough tough work while living in the field camps.
Logging became a huge industry in US as company are busy in supplying wood for new houses in growing urban areas. As ranked one of the most dangerous job, loggers also developed few sports like logrolling which is still practiced by outdoorsmen in games these days
Nowadays the logger’s job has been mechanized largely, below are photos of loggers from the last century as they make their mark on U.S. using only hand tools. But it still required a lot of courage and commitment as Johnny Cash has said:
I learned a man’s gotta be a lot tougher than the timber he’s cutting
1-A lumberjack standing with a redwood
2-Loggers carry a cross-cut saw in front of a giant Sequoia tree’s trunk in California in 1917
3-Around 100 people posing with a logged giant sequoia tree in California.
4-Taken in 1910, Loggers float lumber down the Columbia River in Oregon. The loggers used the system of American rivers to ship the massive quantities of wood.
5-Loggers are largely known as the manliest of men because of the strength required and danger of the work
6- Loggers looking around at the forest while sit on the pieces of timbers they chopped down.
7-Loggers stand on heaps of cut trees in rural New York
8-In the beginning of 20th century, lumberjacks used two men saw to cut into trees
9-The loggers would mostly stay away from homes and live in camps where their fellow workers relaxed between strenuous shifts
10-below, picture is taken in 1892 where lumberjacks standing in the trunk of a tree they chopped down
11-A group of horses pulls a car filled up with pine timber in Red Lake Country, Minnesota, in the beginning of the 20th century
12-Loggers poses for a photo while cutting them with two-men saw and axes
13-Conservation of forests would stop Lumberjacks from cutting down some of the nations’ most majestic trees, just like this enormous Sequoia undercut in 1902
14-JW Edwards of Winston-Salem, a lifelong timber cutter poses with his axe in 1942
15-Lumberjacks load series of pine logs onto a train to be send to a sawmill
16-Three lumberjacks standing next to a fir log which has been cut down with two-men saw in Sedro-Woolley, Washington
17-Loggers move the large pillars of woods with teamwork. Below, a group of loggers in the 1930s, move a timber into a river in West Virginia
18-Below, many log workers in 1930 break up the wood jam on the Little Fork River
19-The parish in 1904, as logging took place all across the country
20-Loggers pose for a photo In the redwoods of Humboldt county
21-This was a tradition in 1800s and early 1900s to take pictures of lumberjacks on the stump of trees recently cut down
22-The logging industry boosted up quickly in the 1800s as more timber was required for settlers expansion
23-Back in the 1800s, Oxes were used as the first part in logging process
