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A History of Lumbering Operations, 1856-1936
by Dick Wilson
Paperback, 90 pages
Nevada County Historical Society, January 1, 1992
In the mid-nineteenth century the Comstock silver strike generated pressure for a timber harvest of historic proportions, and to meet the demands for wood by Nevada miners, an army of loggers invaded the virgin forests of the nearby Truckee Basin. Scores of sawmills sprang up, and soon virtually every timbered canyon in the basin reverberated with axe strokes and whining headsaws.
Following that initial surge, it took three-quarters of a century of continuous lumbering before all but remnants of the vast Truckee forests were reduced to stumps and sawdust. During that period an estimated seven billion feet of sawtimber and ten million cords of fuel wood were harvested from those timberlands. Enough wood, if all had been converted to planks and slabs four inches thick, to build a boardwalk thirty feet wide around the earth.
That harvest of wood provided square sets to line the stopes of Nevada mines, cordwood to feed the furnaces of Comstock stamp mills, sleepers to bed down hundreds of miles of the Central Pacific Railroad, fuel to stoke its locomotives, and building materials for many cities and farms in the treeless expanses of the West.
DICK WILSON began his professional forestry career by mapping vegetation of the Truckee-Tahoe area in the 1930s, when rusting mill machinery, fragments of flumes and chutes, and weathered stump pastures bore mute testimony to a lumbering history that began three-quarters of a century earlier. Intrigued by the evidence, Wilson began studying old records and interviewing old residents. When he retired after a career in the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Air Force, Wilson set out to complete and publish his study. The passage of years had erased many of the earlier land-marks, but photos taken by Wilson about 1940 still exist to show the landscape (and the author) at that time; these and other rare and historic photographs enhance this unusual and fascinating study of what can happen to ancient forests when environmental restraints are absent.