It shouldn't be surprising that logging, particularly for railroad ties,
should be a major industry in the South during the period 1880-1920.
Southern forests were not protected in the way those of the American
Northwest would soon be, under the National Parks Act. etc.  After the
demise of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, C. Vann Woodward tells us in
his "Origins of the New South" classic that large plots of land in the South
went on the auction block to domestic and foreign speculators.  Much of this
forest land was to be exploited for America's biggest business, the railroad
corporations, which literally laid its track on the shaped trees of the
American South.  The elaboration of the transportation infrastructure during
the Gilded Age and Progressive Era required tons of mostly hand shaped ties.
  I first began thinking about it when I read Rosengarten, ed., All God's
Dangers:  The Life of Nate Shaw back in the 1970s.  Nate tells us that in
addition to engaging in cotton and diversified farming, as a young boy in
the 1890s he was forced by his father Hayes to be the other set of hands on
a crosscut saw, shaping out railroad ties.  It was a brutal memory for him;
something he carried into the interviews he did with Rosengarten, arguing
with his father who had been dead for fifty years.  But, multiply Nate's
experience by a couple of hundred thousand in the South during that era and
I think we come close to the material and labor source that made the
completed American railroad system possible.
See, in addition to the other valuable suggestions, the Commissioner and
then Secretary of Agriculture reports from the late -19th century, which
sometimes treat trees as harvestable products and quantify the take and the
loss.
  That the South wasn't totally deforested during this period is testimony
to how rich the region's forest resources had always been.

Harold S. Forsythe
Golieb Fellow
New York University, School of Law
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike and Annette Poston" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 01, 2004 8:15 AM
Subject: Re: Logging History in Virginia


> In Minnesota and Montana, the act of hand hewing railroad ties was
> referred
> to as "hacking ties."  Generally, this involved using a broad-axe or an
> adze
> to flatten at least one side (usually two opposite sides) of a log.  Some
> men did it all with a regular two-bitted axe.  It would have been a rare
> woman, indeed, to do that work in the first half of the 20th century.
> Hacking generally required the woodsman to fell the timber first and then
> hack out the tie.  (It sounds a bit like the old recipe for hasenpfeffer,
> doesn't it?  First catch your rabbit....)
>
> Mike Poston
> Rockville, Maryland
>
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