Courtesy photo A winter in Cornell back in the logging days.

ESCANABA — The axes of the olden days rang out on below zero mornings.

Like dull, heavy coughs, they cut the cold and the wood.

Their voices and the singing of the cross-cut saws seemed to freeze in time, ghost sounds from winters past!

A few photographs remain of the ghosts of winters past. In almost every U.P. home, perhaps tucked away in an attic, are faded photos of ancestors working in one of the many lumber camps.

Logging was the bread and butter of the days of old. We all had a grandpa or great grandpa who spent his winter in the woods with a bunch of whiskery men, an ax, a saw, or a peavey and cant hook.

All of the old photos depicted the same things, shanties and camps with snow up to the eaves, wool chad men, wood smoke, log piles and work horses.

Just by looking at the pictures one can almost smell the saw dust, the creosote, the wet clothes drying on the hooks, tobacco, and strong coffee.

Winter is the best time of the year for logging. The frozen ground and frosty forest made for favorable working conditions. Husbands, fathers, and sons often left the homestead for the logging camp. The work was hard, cold and dangerous, but with any luck by the time spring break up came, they earn a nice roll of money!

The giant white pines fell first throughout Upper Michigan followed by the hardwoods. The sounds of the lumbermen meet with blinding blizzards, wind chills of 40 below, wolf packs, ice jams and the silence of the moonless night.

The logging camps that hired the best cooks were the ones everybody wanted to work for. The cook was camp king. After working outdoors in the winter, the fellas really had an appetite! They ate in silence. Afterwards they many go out for a smoke or a game of cards, but life were pretty dull in the winter camps. Liqueur and ladies were two mid-winter no-no’s at camp.

The lumberjacks went to bed early and worked hard. Their legacy has touched so much of U.P. life. Even today our language is spiced with logging camp jargon like “barn boss”, “getting on the horn”, “grease monkey” and “bull of the woods”.

Logging camps put dots on the map and many small towns grew around them.

It’s hard to imagine the lumberjack’s life back in the olden days. They had to be tough! No wonder the long awaited spring break-up (when a whole winters worth of logs were sent down the rivers to the mills) was such a happy, crazy time for these men.

They got paid and headed to town for a bath, a shave and a bottle! The wiser ones went home and used their money to make improvements around the house or farm.

Today logging is still an important industry. But the work horses have been replaced by machines like “harvesters” and” forwarders” They have heat and lights and computerized controls.

But sometimes on cold grey days, I think the ghosts of the winters past meet up in the frozen woods with the timbermen of today!

——

Karen (Rose) Wils is a lifelong north Escanaba resident. Her folksy columns appear weekly in Lifestyles.