Located within Collier State Park Logging Museum are a number of historical interpretive displays that highlight the rich logging history of this region. This display is the third that visitors encounter while experiencing a self-guided walking tour of logging exhibits. This display's main verbiage reads:
Work it With Muscles
Horse and Oxen Logging
European immigrants often measured progress in stumps. The transformation of forests into farmlands sapped their energies but defined their success. The quest for forest products to build houses and cities moved from east to west. Although logging wand lumber production began in the Pacific Northwest in 1829,
it did not take off as an industry until the 1860s.
Early logging was dangerous, hard labor. Working with cross-cut saws ("misery whips"), men confronted the giants trees of the forest. They made small cuts to fix platforms ("springboards")
that elevated them above the often pitch-filled tree butt,
eyeballed an undercut to help determine the direction a tree would fall, and pulled the saw back and forth to bring down the forest giants. Falling limbs ("widow makers") and splitting tree trunks ("barber chairs") were daily hazards.
Buckers
Men with short saws worked along the downed timber to cut off limbs and saw trees into lengths for hauling.
Oxen and horses provided essential muscle-power to drag log carts, high-wheels, and sleds, or move logs over greased poles ("skid roads"). The draft animals pulled logs directly to the mill or to rivers and ponds where they were floated to the sawmills.
Forest products in the 1860s and the 1870s, except at coastal mills, were for local use because there was no way to export pilings, beams, rough-sawn lumber, shakes, and shingles.