Sawmills

I recently visited a sawmill in Freetown, MA. As I drove down the gravel road I began to get a whiff of one of my favorite scents... sawdust! As I arrived at the mill there were thousands of logs piled high and a barn housing all the equipment. I got out of my truck and walked around checking out all the equipment. It reminded me of Parlee Lumber in MA where my father would always take me to pick up lumber and wood chips.

Since I was a teenager, I have been fascinated by the history of sawmills and logging. I want to share with you a little history of how logs were first milled.

The Saw Pit was first used in the 4th century AD to mill logs into post, beams, and boards. It is simply a pit over which lumber is positioned to be sawed with a long two-handled saw by two men, one standing above the timber and the other below. In some cases, to avoid excavation, a retaining wall was built to rest the tree on while supports, called 'dogs', would take the remaining weight of the tree.



Shipbuilding was a major user of saw pits, often naval, where the planks of wood were sawn for the construction of all classes of vessels. The senior sawsman stood on top of the plank and the junior had to go into the pit, often partially filled with water. The origin of the terms 'top dog' and 'underdog' comes from this process.

The demise of the Saw Pit came around c.1250 when the hydro powered Sawmill was developed in the medieval period and spread widely in Europe in the 16th century. Sawmills had adapted the whipsaw to mechanical power, generally driven by a water wheel to speed up the process. The circular motion of the wheel was changed to back-and-forth motion of the saw blade by the pitman rod. A pitman is similar to a crankshaft, but in reverse (a crankshaft converts back-and-forth motion to circular motion).



In the United States, the sawmill was introduced soon after the colonisation of Virginia by recruiting skilled men from Hamburg. Later the metal parts were obtained from the Netherlands where the technology was far ahead. The arrival of a sawmill was a large and stimulative step in the growth of a frontier community. Early mills were taken to the forest, where a temporary shelter was built, and the logs were skidded to the nearby mill by horse or ox teams, often when there was some snow to provide lubrication. As mills grew larger, they were usually established in more permanent facilities on a river, and the logs were floated down to them by log drivers.



The introduction of steam power in the 19th century created many new possibilities for mills. They could be built away from water and could be far more mechanized. Small gasoline-powered sawmills run by local entrepreneurs served many communities in the early twentieth century, and specialty markets still today.

Here are some photos of an active small gasoline-powered sawmill...





The introduction of electricity and high technology furthered this process, and now most sawmills are massive and expensive facilities in which most aspects of the work is computerized. There is little waste in the facilities. Sawdust is used to make particle board, heat wood drying kilns, and pressed into wood pellets for pellet burning stoves. Larger pieces of wood waste are sent to paper mills and used to make oriented strand board paneling, a cheaper alternative to plywood.

So next time you see a truck load full of wood cruising down the highway, remember that hundreds of years ago it would have taken several men months to produce that much lumber. Today, over 15 million board feet of lumber are imported every year from Canada alone.