Farming Methods & Farming Machinery

Cutting WoodIn the earlier years everyone burned wood in their cook stoves, heating stoves and furnaces. This meant that cutting wood was our winter's work. In the fall of 1939 my dad and I took the team and wagon and we would cut a load of pole wood in the morning and another load in the afternoon. We sawed this pile of wood at the end of November. Then we went out in the woods again in January and cut wood until the middle of March. We would cut a tree down with the cross cut saw and then trim the branches off and pile them up and pile the brush on a pile. Then we would cut the trunk into pieces 6 or 7 feet long. If they were large pieces we would split them several times so that 2 men could carry them. We would then pile them up. In the middle of March we would haul the wood together in large piles and then saw them with a buzz saw at the end of March or the first of April.

There were times when we didn't have any block wood for the furnace, so we would go out into the woods and saw down a large ash or soft maple tree and saw it into 18 inch blocks. Whenever we did this we would cut down the tree and saw off a few chunks. Then we would get a long pole to use as a pry and lift it up far enough to set some blocks under it. This in turn made it easier to saw because you didn't have to stoop down so far. I remember one winter when we had a lot of snow. Every time we would fell a tree (a small one) you couldn't even see it. Whenever H.C.W. Lucht and Martin Mueller cut wood (I remember 1940 in particular) they first cut the trunk into chunks and then cut up the limbs with a buck saw and had small piles of wood all over their woods. My experience with cutting wood was before the days of chain saws. It would be much quicker to saw down and cut up a tree with one of those. I left home in September of 1949 and after that most of our neighbors got chain saws. However, it was good exercise to pull a cross cut saw.