View of Minnehaha Falls, two persons in what appears to be Native American dress are standing separately by the falls; image is invoking the "Song of Hiawatha" poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; trees and plants are quite bare of leaves.
Contributing Institution:
Hennepin County Library, James K. Hosmer Special Collections Library
Logs were shipped by rail from northern Minnesota to Stillwater and made into rafts. They were then floated down the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers. The rafts usually consisted of 8 to 10 strings of logs fastened side by side, each string measuring 16 across and about 400 feet long. Some of these enormous rafts stretched 4 or 5 acres in size.
Lumber was rafted downstream from Stillwater. Boards were arranged in cribs or heavy crates, each 16 feet wide and 32 feet long. A lumber raft might contain as many as 200 cribs.
Stereoscope view. Image contains edge of wooden railing of the Union Avenue bridge, a man standing along the edge of the river and residences and businesses in the distance.
At the boom, floating timbers chained between piers caught and contained logs for sorting and measuring and rigging into rafts. At one time, the Stillwater boom extended a distance of 9 miles and employed 400 men to sort, scale and raft timber.