Quote:
Originally Posted by Floyd_Davidson
Danged near all of them had a sawmill! You just don't realize that to have a sawmill all it takes is one two man whipsaw (one man can use it alone though, but...).
The rest of the "sawmill" is made of logs and dirt.
Of course most people didn't want to whipsaw planks for floorboards! Why too much work for too little results. Same with roofing. If you think split logs are labor intensive, just whip out a few planks!
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A one or two man whipsaw or a guy with a gas chainsaw is not a "Saw Mill", just because they cut lumber doesn't mean they were a "Mill". "Mills" were powered by horses, water, steam, gas and electricity. A lot of the Amish on the Eastern State use whip saws in building, but they aren't called "Sawmills".
Here, this may help you out....
Sawmill - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
History
The earliest known reference to a working sawmill comes from a Roman poet,
Ausonius who wrote an epic poem about the river
Moselle in
Germany in the 4th century AD. At one point in the poem he describes the shrieking sound of a watermill cutting marble. It is likely that different kinds of
watermills were well used in the Roman period from references given by
Vitruvius in 25 BC and
Pliny the Elder in 77 AD.
By the 11th century,
hydropowered sawmills were in widespread use throughout the
medieval Islamic world, from
Islamic Spain and
North Africa in the west to
Central Asia in the east.
[2] Sawmills eventually became widespread in
medieval Europe as well, as one was sketched by
Villard de Honnecourt in c. 1250.
[3] They are claimed to have been introduced to
Madeira following its discovery in c. 1420 and spread widely in Europe in the 16th century.
[4]
The sawmill was also described by the Dutchman
Cornelis Corneliszoon (1550-1607) by applying a
pitman arm onto a wind mill, which converted a turning motion into an up-an-down motion. Corneliszoon patented the sawmill on
December 15,
1593 and the pitman on
December 6,
1597. He built the first sawmill there in 1594.
Prior to the invention of the sawmill, boards were rived and planed, or more often sawn by two men with a whipsaw, using saddleblocks to hold the log, and a
saw pit for the pitman who worked below. Sawing was slow, and required strong and enduring men. The topsawer had to be the stronger of the two because the saw was pulled in turn by each man, and the lower had the advantage of gravity. The topsawyer also had to guide the saw so that the board was of even thickness. This was often done by following a chalkline.
Early sawmills simply adapted the
whipsaw to mechanical power, generally driven by a
water wheel to speed up the process. The circular motion of the wheel was changed to back-and-forth motion of the saw blade by a
Connecting rod known as a
pitman (thus introducing a term used in many mechanical applications). A pitman is similar to a crankshaft, but in reverse; a crankshaft converts back-and-forth motion to circular motion.
Generally, only the saw was powered, and the logs had to be loaded and moved by hand. An early improvement was the development of a movable carriage, also water powered, to move the log steadily through the saw blade.
A small mill such as this would be the center of many rural communities in wood-exporting regions such as the
Baltic countries and
Canada. The output of such mills would be quite low, perhaps only 500 boards per day. They would also generally only operate during the winter, the peak logging season.
In the
United States, the sawmill was introduced soon after the colonisation of
Virginia by recruiting skilled men from
Hamburg. Later the metal parts were obtained from the
Netherlands,
[5] where the technology was far ahead of that in
England, where the sawmill remained largely unknown until the late 18th century. The arrival of a sawmill was a large and stimulative step in the growth of a frontier community.
Early mills were taken to the forest, where a temporary shelter was built, and the logs were skidded to the nearby mill by horse or ox teams, often when there was some snow to provide lubrication. As mills grew larger, they were usually established in more permanent facilities on a river, and the logs were floated down to them by
log drivers.
The next improvement was the use of circular saw blades, and soon thereafter, the use of gangsaws, which added additional blades so that a log would be reduced to boards in one quick step. Circular saw blades were extremely expensive and highly subject to damage by overheating or dirty logs. A new kind of technician arose, the
sawfiler. Sawfilers were highly skilled in metalworking. Their main job was to
set and sharpen teeth. The craft also involved learning how to
hammer a saw, whereby a saw is deformed with a hammer and anvil to counteract the forces of heat and cutting. The circular saw was a later introduction, perhaps invented in England in the late 18th century, but perhaps in 17th century Holland,
Netherlands. Modern
circular saw blades have replaceable teeth, but still need to be hammered.
[6]
The introduction of
steam power in the 19th century created many new possibilities for mills. They could be built away from water and could be far more mechanized. Scrap lumber from the mill provided a ready fuel source for firing the boiler. Efficiency was increased, but the capital cost of a new mill increased dramatically as well.
By 1900, the largest sawmill in the world was operated by the Atlantic Lumber Company in
Georgetown, South Carolina, using logs floated down the
Pee Dee River from as far as the edge of the
Appalachian Mountains in
North Carolina.
A restoration project for
Sturgeon's Mill in Northern California is underway, restoring one of the last steam-powered lumber mills still using its original equipment.
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