Long before Thomas O¿Donnell entered school he had chewed tobacco and pitched horseshoes with lumberjacks at his father¿s camp. He witnessed the felling of the tallest trees and watched wide-eyed as the lumberjacks rode the logs through swift waters. He sat at the table when they arm wrestled and was a spectator at axe throwing competitions. Life in a North Woods Lumber Camp is O¿Donnell¿s personal story of his life growing up in a lumber camp, vivid recollections that lay dormant for fifty years following his death. William J. O¿Hern has brought this lost treasure to light in a lavishly illustrated book with dozens of period photographs.

Twelve-year-old Gus McCarty struggles at school with an obnoxious classmate named Al until an accident sends him back in time to a lumber camp with an equally troublesome lumberjack named Alex.

To Ruby, her log-riding lumberjack pa is the most wonderful person in the world. There's nothing she'd rather do than follow in his footprints, but a lumber camp is no place for an eight-year-old girl. So Ruby goes to school. There she discovers another passion -- the world that opens up to her in books. When circumstances suddenly change, Ruby fears she has lost the two things she loves most. But through her struggle, she discovers in herself the courage, kindness, and talent that she always admired in her father.

Logging in Wisconsin explores the 70 years when logging ruled the state, covering the characters who worked in forests and on rivers, the tools they used, and the places where they lived and worked. Wisconsin was the perfect setting for the lumber industry: acres of white pine forests (acquired through treaties with American Indians) and rivers to transport logs to sawmills. From 1840 to 1910, logging literally reshaped the landscape of Wisconsin, providing employment to thousands of workers. The lumber industry attracted businessmen, mills, hotels, and eventually the railroad. This led to the development of many Wisconsin cities, including Eau Claire, Oshkosh, Stevens Point, and Wausau. Rep. Ben Eastman told Congress in 1852 that the Wisconsin forests had enough lumber to supply the United States "for all time to come." Sadly, this was a grossly overestimated belief, and by 1910, the Wisconsin forests had been decimated.

In Wood Hicks and Bark Peelers, Ronald E. Ostman and Harry Littell draw on the stunning documentary photography of William T. Clarke to tell the story of Pennsylvania’s lumber heyday, a time when loggers serving the needs of a rapidly growing and globalizing country forever altered the dense forests of the state’s northern tier. Discovered in a shed in upstate New York and a barn in Pennsylvania after decades of obscurity, Clarke’s photographs offer an unprecedented view of the logging, lumbering, and wood industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They show the great forests in the process of coming down and the trains that hauled away the felled trees and trimmed logs. And they show the workers—cruisers, jobbers, skidders, teamsters, carpenters, swampers, wood hicks, and bark peelers—their camps and workplaces, their families, their communities. The work was demanding and dangerous; the work sites and housing were unsanitary and unsavory. The changes the newly industrialized logging business wrought were immensely important to the nation’s growth at the same time that they were fantastically—and tragically—transformative of the landscape. An extraordinary look at a little-known photographer’s work and the people and industry he documented, this book reveals, in sharp detail, the history of the third phase of lumber in America.