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Logging the Farm

Like most of lowland Whatcom County, the farm was logged late in the nineteenth century. Those early loggers only cut the best timber, using axes and two man crosscut saws to fall the trees and ox teams to pull the logs over skid roads to the Nooksack River.

Fir stump supporting birch trees a century after logging.
Skid Roads

A skid road to the river at Ferndale ran along the south boundary of the farm, parallel to and a quarter mile north of the Smith Road. I don’t think there are any signs of the skid road left now. Skid roads were routes through the woods for hauling logs. Skids were laid across the road a couple feet apart and greased to make the logs slide easier. Ox teams dragged the logs over the skids. The oxen were slow, but they could pull harder and longer than horses and were less prone to injury.

Dad said they were still occasionally hauled logs on the skid road when he was small, which must have been around 1920 or a little earlier, since Dad was born in 1913. He said that his parents kept him away from the skid road because they did not want him to hear the teamsters swearing.

When I was a kid, Dad pointed out a few cedar logs, about four feet long and a foot in diameter that he said were skids on the old skid road. I looked for those old skids the other day, but they must have rotted away to oblivion.

My guess is that the skid road ended just down stream from the log jam that blocked the Nooksack at Ferndale until 1877. A skid road built after 1877 would have no particular reason to end below the jam, but I suspect that the skid road might have been that old, because logging of the lowlands east of Ferndale must have begun well before then. I have not yet found a map showing the skid roads, but I am still looking.

Logging Equipment

The productivity of the old logging shows must have been low compared to today’s chainsaws, bulldozers, and logging trucks. When the old time loggers cut down a tree, they had to choose the trees carefully. They would not touch the lowly vine maple.  The largest cedars and Douglas Firs were too large to handle, so they left them behind. They also passed by trees with too many limbs. They cut the trees ten or twelve feet above the ground to avoid sawing by hand through the thick part of the trunk.

Springboards

The old time loggers used what they called ‘springboards’. These were wooden boards reinforced with iron straps.

Remains of springboard notch in old fir stump. Fifty years ago, the notch was much more distinct.

The logger chopped a horizontal niche into the tree and stuck the end of the springboard into the niche, then stood on the spring board. If they were not past the swell of the trunk, they would chop another niche while balancing on the first spring-board. Using that technique, they could walk up a tree as high as they needed.

Falling Axes

When they had established their perch on the side of the tree, they chopped out the undercut. This was a notch, cut in about a quarter of the diameter of the tree, that would control the direction of the fall. Their tools were a cross cut saw, a double-bit falling ax, and aching muscles.

Falling axes were kept razor sharp. Chopping an undercut could take all day with a sharp ax and there was no time or strength to waste on a dull ax. John Schaefer, who worked in the logging camps, told me that he once saw a faller threaten to punch a swamper in the face when he started to sharpen the faller’s ax with a file. The faller maintained that his ax had to be sharpened on a stone and would be ruined by a file.

Triumph of the Logger

Falling a big fir could take days of chopping and sawing balanced on narrow spring-boards. When a tree finally fell, it must have been gratifying, a triumph of human will and patience over the massive passivity of nature.

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Education

Neither of my grandfathers went to school past the third grade. They both read the Bellingham Herald every day, never needed help with written instructions, voted in every election, and kept themselves as well informed as the average voter in their precinct; they were both quick mental calculators with the wits to sniff the air and negotiate a favorable deal while the stakes were changing. My mother said her father could play any musical instrument he touched. He fiddled to entertain the neighbors and he read, transposed, and arranged music. But for both my grandfathers, from grade three on, their only classroom was work on the farm.

I believe my grandfather’s lack of education was a thorn in the side of my great-grandfather, Gottlieb, who was raised in East Prussia and orphaned about the age of twelve. Lucky for him, nineteenth century Prussia was busy founding European social democracy. When he and his younger brother were orphaned, the newly established Prussian social safety net snatched them up and educated them in the Prussian public school system. The pair emigrated to America with an exemplary liberal and technical education.

Life in America was a success for Gottlieb. Technically trained as a woodworker, he was quickly hired in railroad car yards building passenger cars decorated with ornate woodwork in Detroit and then Stevens Point, Wisconsin. He worked in the car yards until he accumulated the resources for his next step: he bought a farm in Minnesota and became a land-owning farmer in about 1880.

Gottlieb’s farm in Blue Earth Minnesota was ten degrees south of the 52nd parallel of Gottlieb’s birthplace in Prussia, but Blue Earth’s temperature extremes are closer to those of harsh Scandinavia or Russia than the mild northern marine climate of Prussia.

Gottlieb and his growing sons learned to farm in Minnesota, and apparently they learned well. By the 1890’s Gottlieb had collected the resources for another step. This time a move to Whatcom County, Washington Territory, a place with a wet marine climate that called itself the “fourth corner” because it was the last corner of the country to be settled. This was Gottlieb’s final move.

Gottlieb’s Minnesota decade was as harsh as the Minnesota winter. The family has never said anything good about Minnesota in 1880s.

Cold, hot, dusty, miserable. Not enough rain and too much snow. Hail recalling biblical stonings. Few schools, a dismal fact than scarcely mattered when there was too much work to allow school in the summer and too much cold for school in the winter.

My grandfather was born during the Minnesota decade in Blue Earth. He had an older and a younger brother. Older brothers had first right to education, my grandfather’s younger brother was too young to do a man’s work on the farm. If someone had to stay home to work, it was my grandfather. A third grade education was the best Gottlieb could give him. Gottlieb’s thorn was his intelligent, energetic second son who had no trade, no science, no history, no literature, no art, no philosophy, no theology; only the bare skeleton of literacy and far too advanced training in hard labor and disappointment.

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The Barn

Barns in Whatcom County, and all over the US, changed in the mid-twentieth century. In Whatcom County, the dairy industry propelled the change. In the old, pre-refrigeration, days, every farm had a few dairy cows, just enough to supply the family with fresh milk, cream, and butter. A few dairies near population centers were larger and supplied fresh milk to non-farm families, but their size and location was severely limited by the rapid handling required to prevent milk from spoiling. Butter and cheese were the only traditional ways of preserving fragile milk and they were not an effective economic connection between remote farms and city populations.

Until the forties– I’m not sure of the year– my grandparents had only three or four cows. My grandpa and and my dad sat on three legged stools and milked the cows by hand. The milk was cooled by placing a twenty gallon milk can into a tank of cool well water. The milk that the family and one or two neighbors could not consume then went to a hand-cranked, later electric, centrifugal cream separator. Cream kept long enough to sell to a dairy, and the perishable skim milk went to the hogs.

For its first fifty years, cash crops on the farm were quite diverse. Grandpa sold potatoes, eggs, sugar beets, wheat, oats, garden vegetables, beef, pork, cream, and probably other things I never heard about. Mid-century, the diversity of cash crops ended. The farm became a dairy farm with three cash crops: whole milk, eggs, and potatoes.

The economy of the family centered on the monthly milk check. Dad and Grandpa sold an occasional cull dairy cow for beef, a load of hay, straw, oats, or wheat when they had a surplus or the price was too good to pass up, but those were bumper crops and windfalls, not to be counted on to pay taxes and the electricity bill. Dad continued to raise grass, wheat, oats, and corn, but as feed for the dairy cows, not as cash sources. The eggs and potatoes were still cash crops, but these sidelines were only assurance that there would be no idle time left after dairying and raising fodder.

The transformation to a dairy farm also transformed the barn. In 1940, the barn housed a team of horses, a bull, a few cows and calves, and their hay, grain, and bedding. By 1950, the herd grew to close to thirty head, requiring specialized space for milking and more storage for hay, silage, and grain. The horses were replaced with a tractor and the adoption of artificial insemination eliminated the prison-like quarters for a sometimes violent bull.

The  war time Seattle population clamoring for refrigerated whole milk drove the change. With improved transportation and refrigeration, Whatcom County, a  hundred miles to the north, became a major milk supplier, and eventually grew to be one of the largest milk producing counties in the US. But Whatcom dairy farms first had to meet the requirements of the King County Health Department to get a Grade A license, which was the entrance ticket to the twentieth century economy for a farmer in what was called the fourth corner of the country.

Like health departments all over, King County required concrete floors, painted walls, and generally sanitary conditions in the milking barn and milk house. As time went on, they also required refrigerated storage of milk on the farm. The days of cans of well-water-cooled milk sitting on milk stands waiting for the milk truck were over. From the cow to a refrigerated storage tank to a refrigerated tank truck was the only acceptable way to handle Grade A milk.

Dad and Grandpa added a concrete floored milking wing to the barn before I was born. The milking barn had eighteen stanchions to hold cows while they were milking and was specifically constructed to meet King County Health Department regulations. The stanchions were equipped with vacuum lines to operate milking machines. They also added a concrete silo to replace the small wood stave silo that was only adequate for the small herd of the old days. The old milk house was located at the well and set up for water cooling the milk; Dad replaced it with a new milk house that was closer to the barn and contained a refrigerated milk tank.

In addition to changes to the barn, Dad appropriated every bit of spare dry space in out buildings for storing oats and wheat that he had milled for his own blend of dairy feed. The old horse barn, hog barn, even the little mother-in-law house that Grandpa built for my great grandmother were eventually requisitioned for grain storage.

This was the barn as it was while I was growing up. It continued to be used in the same way for close to fifty years until an accident forced Dad to retire.