The Sawmill

Daniel Boone Homestead is home to one of the few operational water-powered sawmills in the country. Today I got to see the sawmill running for the first time, and I learned quite a bit about how it actually operates. Conveniently, I have also been reading a little about the economy of the Oley Valley in Pendleton's Oley Valley Heritage, and so I know how the sawmill fit in to the economic scheme of the valley.

The Oley Valley was a thriving region in colonial Pennsylvania. The valley can be split in half in terms of soil, with a rich limestone in the northern portion, perfect for farming, and a less fertile red shale in the southern half. The Oley Valley also became a seedbed of early American Industry. It was home to iron furnaces, and a lot of mills. The two most common types of mills at the time were grist mills and saw mills. Grist mills grind up wheat or other grains into flour. Saw mills cut logs into boards, which I guess is pretty self-explanatory. The sawmill may seem like a pretty basic idea, but processing lumber without one can be a real pain. If a sawmill was unavaliable typically what one would do was use a pit saw. One person would stand inside of a pit, with another person standing over top of it on a support that they had rigged up. They would lay the log over the pit and each would hold an end of the saw and move it up and down. It was pretty backbreaking work, not to mention the person who was on the bottom was eating sawdust all day! So the sawmill was a true inovation and people were glad to have them.

Jim Lewars and Jeff Becker were the two who gave us the talk about the sawmill today. They explained that it worked by diverting water from a stream and storing it up in an underground tank. Once the tank was full a lever was pushed and a small door in the side of the tank was opened. The energy expended from all the water in the tank trying to squeeze through the whole is what makes the wheel turn. The wheel is attached to an arm that moves up and down and consequentially moves the saw up and down. The log that is being cut is laid hozontally onto a sort of holder that is also attached to a small wheel and operated by the force of the water. As the blade is moving up and dawn the holder is pulled by the spinning of the wheel slowly from left to right. This makes the log move as it's being cut, and allows it to be cut completly down the middle. The boards that are cut at the sawmill are rarely perfect. Usually they vary about a half inch from one end to the other, but the ease and time saved with the sawmill made up for any inacuracy in cutting, and with a pit saw the boards were rarely perfect either.

The sawmill we have at Daniel Boone was used commercially until the 1940's. This had important consequences for historians and preservationists. Usually historians can tell that a board in a house is old by looking for saw marks charecteristic of a sawmill. But if some water-powered mills were used up until the twentieth century, the marks on many boards can be deceptive. A piece of wood may have been made in the 1890's but an unknowing historian could date it from the eighteenth century if they were unaware that a water-powered sawmill was still used in the area.

It just goes to show that history is not as concrete as we may think.