This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ...of logs were handled by rail, of which no record seems obtainable. The Menominee Iiver Boom Company has operated from 1868 to the present time and during that period has passed through its booms 10,808,749,178 feet of logs. The mind can hardly appreciate the immensity of these figures. Taking another view, and ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ...of logs were handled by rail, of which no record seems obtainable. The Menominee Iiver Boom Company has operated from 1868 to the present time and during that period has passed through its booms 10,808,749,178 feet of logs. The mind can hardly appreciate the immensity of these figures. Taking another view, and placing a fair average value of $18 per thousand upon these logs we have a total value of $194,550,000 of the rough lumber product that has floated down this one river. One hundred, ninety-four million dollars is a large sum. It is to be hoped that this computation will be carried on until a fair estimate is made and recorded of all the pine that has been cut from the whole Peninsula. Lumbering on the Menominee reached its zenith in the year 1889, when 642 million feet of logs passed through the booms, having a probable lumber value of $11,716,000; quite a harvest for one season from one river alone. Menominee was, at that time, the largest lumber port in the world, a historical fact placed to the credit of our forests., . Since that time there have been great changes in lumbering; transportation of logs by water has been largely supplanted by rail transportation; many conservation features have been introduced in the operations of both camps and mills, reducing what was an almost criminal waste to practically a negative quantity. In the beginning of lumbering only the best, we might say the cream of the timber was brought to the mills, and it was common to take only logs where 2, 3 or 4 sixteen-foot logs would cut a thousand feet of lumber, leaving the rest to be wasted in the fires that often cleaned up the.old "choppings" and created further great waste by spreading into the surrounding timber. As late as 1888, when the industry had...
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