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Page 53
FIRST LUMBERING
CHAPTER X
THE year in which the first lumbering was commenced in
Brady Township is not known. Welton Barrett seems to have been the
pioneer lumberman. He commenced his operations by making a "long
shaved shingle", conveying them to the Susquehanna River where he
constructed an "ark" upon which to load his shingles to carry them
down the river, on the spring floods, to the eastern markets.
The making of "long" shingles was an arduous task. The
machinery for this operation was composed of a cross-cut saw, an
axe, a froe, a wooden mallet, shingle horse and a draw knife. This
equipment could be carried by the operator.
To do this work, the "Shingle Maker" had to locate a
sound pine tree of straight grain for splitting, and the first part
of his manufacturing was completed. The next thing was to cut down
his tree, cut it into twenty-eight inch blocks, and then split the
blocks into quarters with his axe, and split the shingles off the
blocks with his froe and mallet, and then shave them on his shingle
horse A good shingle maker could split from the quartered blocks and
shave one thousand shingles in a day, which means between sun rise
and sun down.
For these shingles, he received the large sum of four
dollars per thousand, delivered at Luthersburg. It must be
remembered that after his shingles were made in the woods, a road
had to be cut through the forest to the public road to get these
shingles out.
The overhead labor, from the time of the cutting the
tree to the delivery of the shingles at Luthersburg, meant much more
than the shaving of one thousand shingles per day. For this thousand
shingles the merchant traded to the operator his merchandise at one
hundred per cent or more profit, and when we realize that a great
many of the early settlers paid for their land by making shingles,
we can understand what a struggle they had.
Shortly after 1840 David Irvin had erected a water
power saw mill on Rock Run, just above the intersection of Little
Anderson Creek below Rockton Station, on which he sawed boards,
which he hauled to the Susquehanna River to raft on the spring
floods to the eastern market.
Lumbering on Sandy in the vicinity of DuBois, as near
as can be ascertained, commenced in 1859, when Mr. Andrew Liddle
made the first square timber on his land, and rafted it in on the
Luthersburg Branch, more than three miles above DuBois. A raft of
timber at that time consisted of about twelve sticks of timber,
ranging from twenty-four feet to fifty feet in length. The stream,
at the point
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