I found an old two man cross cut saw belonging to my Grandfather hanging in the old sheep shed, you know, the type used in the woods harvesting trees back at the turn of the century...the 1900 turn of the century that is. But I had one perplexing question; why would every raker be broken off??? I could see if it hit an embedded piece of hardware, which is common around here, a few rakers might be broken off, but this two man cross cut saw had every raker snapped off from toe to heel, and it was clear, they were broken off too and not cut. Whomever did this, snapped every raker off deliberate and the question was why.

 

It took a visit from an elderly lady who used to live at the bottom of the hill to answer this year old question. Having lost both parents by age 9, she was raised by her Grandfather and a friend of the family, and a patriarch of the town. He was so influential that when the town refused to build a bridge across a stream leading to his house as a short-cut, he built the bridge himself and when people began to use it, erected a toll both and started charging for passage. The town and him got into a quarrel over his bridge, but they ended up compensating him for the span at which he promptly built a store. For years not only did he sell gas, his influence was such that on the night before town meeting, people would gather at his store and decided who was going to be selectman the following day. So in other words, not much has changed in 80 years! (This town of 100 families still has an annual townmeeting, selectman, and yes it is predetermined who is going to win though the out-of-stater's have not realized this yet and still show up and campaign on their soapboxes on the 3rd Saturday in March).

 

But I digress...

 

This lady began to explain her Grandfather's Farm one day and it became blazing clear why the rakers had been snapped off. The two man cross cut saw never had been used on wood, the saw was used to cut ice!! My Grandfather and her's flooded the stream every fall and let the water freeze over the winter. When it got a foot thick, they cleared off the snow, chopped a hole, weighted one end of the saw with a lead weight and sawed out blocks and blocks of ice. Yep no rakers needed!!

Real interesting story Travis. Thanks for sharing. bob

 

---

Bob Kloes
www.bobkloes.com

As always Travis, and wonderful story and well written. Thanks for sharing just another very interesting and captivating part of your family and town. The history in your location and blood line is a wonderful thing, not many folks these days can have this much material to draw from.

Now, if the rakers were left on, I would imagine the saw would grab and lurch too much in the ice? Just my own conclusion.

 

---

John Morris
The Patriot Woodworker

You might check the set of the teeth, too. For years we used a one man cross cut saw to create an access hole for scuba diving under the ice. I found the set on the teeth was narrow enough that by the time we had the third side of the triangular hole cut the first side had started to re-freeze. Reset the teeth and that eliminated the problem.

Lew

I am not sure about the set of the saw as I have no other saw to compare it to. Just looking at a two man cross cut saw, you can see the aggressiveness of them, which amazes me. I do have a New England book on Logging and it puts the Two Man Cross Cut Saw coming into play in 1892. That is probably debatable, but in the big scheme of things, they were using axes, and only axes for quite a while.

 

I know in my Grandfather's youth, he told me about him and his brother cutting two big beams for his chicken barn. They were spruce, flattened on one side and spanned the entire length of the barn at 80 feet. The diameter on the big end was well over 3 feet thick...big for Spruce around here. I say that because I harvested some Spruce back in 1994 with a skidder, down in a hole that was impossible to log without one. My Grandfather flipped his tractor on the steep hillside and thus never got down into the bottom of this "bowl". (I call it a bowl because it is steep all the way around this area with the only way out being uphill). I pulled out some White Spruce 32" in diameter, getting 2 16 foot logs and a 12 foot log, then shipped the rest for studwood from this area. The trucker and log scaler both marveled at the size and total length of the logs and both said I would never cut anything like that again, and I believe them. I was able to get some Spruce Veneer out of it at $400 per thousand board feet...an insane price for a logger, but obviously cheap compared to what woodworkers pay for the stuff.

 

Speaking of prices, it is really scary that in 16 years time, the prices for wood are exactly the same for us loggers. Even though the cost of fuel has risen, inflation for parts and chainsaws, we get the same price as we did 16 years ago for most species of wood, which hardly seems fair. Still the landowner is the real victim here as they have their property taxes increasing exponentially it seems year after year, yet they too are not getting any more for the wood that is being grown upon the land.

 

The only real difference is in the very local wood market of Yellow Birch, Ash, Maple and Hemlock. Right now due to the Stimulus Package of a few years ago, the local power company (a Spanish Firm mind you), got the money to expand the power grid here. This expansion uses wooden mats, 16 feet long, 8 inches thick of this type of wood to cross wet areas on the expanded powerlines. They are buying up millions of board feet of the stuff just to drive bulldozers, logging equipment and the like on top of. This has raised the price of these kinds of logs from $160 per thousand board feet, to a whopping $210 per thousand board feet which is extremely lucrative. But as woodworkers think about the waste; these are nice hardwood logs being pulverized by bulldozer tracks and squashed into the mud, forever to be lost. This is nothing new though, in the old days of horse logging where a good skid road was needed, the loggers would often cut hardwood trees and fill ravines to make a level road for the skidding horses. They used hardwood because it would not float like the Spruce and Pine logs they were after. Still, the value today of the hardwood they used for fill far exceeded the Spruce and Pine they dragged over it. Even as late as the 1990's, loggers were told that any hardwood that got in the way, to just tip it over and leave it as the paper companies went after the softwood. Today, with advances in papermaking technology, and where less chemicals are needed to bleach the white pulp of hardwood, selling softwood pulp is done on "tickets" and "quotas" where as hardwood pulp is always taken.

 

Somethings change, and yet something forever remain the same, but I greatly dislike waste, especially of good hardwood sawlogs.