Lumberjacks : Discovery (Kids Activity Sheet)

ADVERTISEMENT

Lumberjacks : Discovery
The term Lumberjack has been replaced by Logger for professional people who cut down
trees in order to harvest lumber. Lumber is just a fancy term for wood that has been cut to
be used in construction or the manufacture of paper and furniture. The term Lumberjack is
now mostly meant to refer to people who adopt woodcutting as a competitive sport.
Origins of Lumberjacking
While woodcutting and wood-gathering have been a human occupation from time
immemorial, lumberjacking as a mass profession started in Scandinavia, Canada, and the
northern United States a few hundred years ago.
Lumberjacking was tough, hard work requiring huge amounts of strength and endurance. It
was seasonal work not possible when the mountainous regions where the best timber was
to be found got snowed out. Lumberjacks had to take the work as it came and had to move
into the logger camps when the season started.
It was Scandinavian loggers who formed the bulk of the industry when serious logging on
the North American continent started in the US state of Maine. This caused the cultivation
of the lumberjack image of tall, blond-haired, very muscular, red-faced giants. Lumberjacks
traditionally used axes to cut down trees and a team of two lumberjacks could also use a
crosscut saw to saw through the trunk of a tree.
Some of the other skills needed for lumberjacking included high climbing or tree topping
where the lumberjack used iron hooks and rope to climb up a tree, cut down its branches
and the tree top as he climbed, and attached rigging and pulleys to the tree so that it could
be used as a spar. Attaching chokers or steel cables to felled logs in order to roll it down the
mountain to a landing area was another set of skills. Sometime, the tree would be
transported by water to sawmills and tree rolling became a skill. Lumberjacks would wear
spiked boots called caulks or corks to stay on a log when rolling it down river.

ADVERTISEMENT

00 votes

Related Articles

Related forms

Related Categories

Parent category: Education
Go
Page of 4