-
Part Two. Day 4
- University of North Texas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
163 Part Two, Day 3 Part Two Day 4 LOG RAFTING River Mile 76.8 8:30 A.M. I hadn’t left I. C.’s camp long when I came upon a bend where a big log raft once piled up. I. C.’s mother, Liza Ard Eason, was cook on the raft. The cook 164 Reflections on the Neches shack was usually a tent on the last crib. When the raft hit land in the bend of the river, she saw that it was beginning to break apart and pile up, so she dived into the water and swam clear. That must have been an awesome sight: those great logs piling up like match sticks. She always told I. C. that if the river ever got low enough to expose the logs, he should pull them out, for they were virgin longleaf pine logs and would be as good as new due to submersion in the water. The year Saul Aronow, Ranger David McHugh, and I canoed the upper Neches, it was lower than I had ever seen it and that was the year I. C. pulled out a good portion of the logs. The fence around his house on Highway 92 was made of hand-rived pales from these logs. The river was the only way they could transport timber from the Neches watershed to the big lumber mills in Beaumont. Loggers would kill the trees by girdling them, wait a year for them to dry standing up, then cut them down with axes and two-man crosscut saws. Oxen and mules dragged the logs to the sloughs, then, when the winter floods came and water rose, the logs were floated. The main routes in the flooded bottomlands had the trees along them cut while the water was down, and they were called float roads. The logs were fastened with wooden pegs into cribs, or small rafts, and the cribs were connected by chains or ropes to make a long raft. The end of each log was struck with a sledge hammer that had a raised letter on it, thus branding the logs so the receiving mills would know to whom the logs should be credited . Perhaps the owner suspected some enterprising loggers might decide to sell a few logs on their own and pocket the proceeds. The loggers waited until the foam on the river gathered down the center, for they knew then that the river water was falling. If the foam was dispersed out of banks, the water was still rising, the logs would be scattered in the flooded woods and be difficult to guide or retrieve. Most of the early families rafted logs. According to Austin Withers, the Ellis family rafted logs from the Forks of the River (where the Neches and Angelina met); the Beans from near Kirbyville and below Sally Withers Lake; Ramers and Swearingens from near Spurger; Wrights, Withers, and Richardsons between Spurger and Evadale. The Beans had considerable property up and down the river and so hauled to different points. A large slough bisecting the Neches Bottom Unit around River Mile 56.5, is known as the Bean Float Road. Later, investors from the North, like the Fords, bought timber from family land to harvest it themselves and float to their sawmills downriver. According to Bob Allen, now of Silsbee, he and his father, Ernest Allen, [18.213.4.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:15 GMT) 165 Part Two, Day 4 ran the last raft of logs, which had been hewn to square timbers, down the Neches in 1929. They floated all the way from near Diboll to Beaumont. Loggers on the Neches must have been mighty men. I’ve cut down a few small trees with an axe and I can personally assure you it took a lot of muscle, time, and patience to fell the giants of those virgin forests. The strength, skill, and agility required to ride the individual logs through the swift currents of the flooded bottomlands to the watery roads to join the rafts, then direct the rafts down the raging river through snags, fallen trees, and around sharp bends, must have been prodigious. Men would stand on the lead rafts with long poles called peavey or jam poles to guide the rafts away from banks and snags. Even then, pileups were not uncommon. When the log rafts hit a snag or anything that stopped the first cribs, the current continued moving the...