Forest Life and Forest Trees: comprising winter camp-life among the loggers, and wild-wood adventure.: with Descriptions of lumbering operations on the various; rivers of Maine and New BrunswickSpringer, John S.
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Forest Life and Forest Trees: comprising winter camp-life among the loggers, and wild-wood adventure.: with Descriptions of lumbering operations on the various; rivers of Maine and New Brunswick
Springer, John S.
Lumbering -- Maine; Maine -- Description and travel; New Brunswick -- Description and travel; Trees
I have worked in the forests among this timber several years, have cut
many hundreds of trees, and seen many thousands, but have never found
one larger than the one I felled on a little stream which emptied into
Jackson Lake, near the head of Baskahegan stream, in the eastern part
of Maine. This was a "Pumpkin" Pine; its trunk was as straight and
handsomely grown as a molded candle, and measured six feet in diameter
four feet from the ground, without the aid of spur roots. It was
about nine rods in length, or one hundred and forty-four feet, about
sixty-five feet of which was free of limbs, and retained its diameter
remarkably well. I was employed about one hour and a quarter in
felling it. The afternoon was beautiful; every thing was calm, and to
me the circumstances were deeply interesting. After chopping an hour
or so, the mighty giant, the growth of centuries, which had withstood
the hurricane, and raised itself in peerless majesty above all around,
began to tremble under the strokes of a mere insect, as I might appear
in comparison with it. My heart palpitated as I occasionally raised my
eye to its pinnacle to catch the first indications of its fall. It
came down at length with a crash which seemed to shake a hundred
acres, while the loud echo rang through the forest, dying away among
the distant hills. It had a hollow in the butt about the size of a
barrel, and the surface of the stump was sufficiently capacious to
allow a yoke of oxen to stand upon it. It made five logs, and loaded a
six-ox team three times. The butt log was so large that the stream did
not float it in the spring, and when the drive was taken down we were
obliged to leave it behind, much to our regret and loss. At the boom
that log would have been worth fifty dollars.
Of the White Pine there are varieties, which by some are attributed to
peculiar characteristics of the various locations in which they grow.
That variety called sapling Pine, bull sapling, &c., usually grows on
high, hard-wood land, or a mixture of evergreens and deciduous trees;
particularly on the boundaries which mark damp, low forests and the
lower border of ridges. The pumpkin Pine is generally found on flat
land and in ravines; also on abrupt ridges, called horsebacks, where
the forest is dense.
The sap or outside of the sapling Pine is much thicker than that of
the pumpkin Pine. I have seen it more than six inches thick on the
former, and less than half an inch on the latter. This difference is
accounted for by the rapidity with which the sapling grows, and the
tardiness with which the swamp Pine matures, which, as before
intimated, is to be attributed to the difference in their location.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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