A brief history of river recovered logs

Out of the depths of the murky waters of the St. John's River comes one of the most beautiful and rare species of lumber in Florida- heart pine and cypress sinker logs.

These logs aren't just beautiful, rare, and limited, but they are also a little piece of history that date back thousands of years. Here, we will tell you a little piece of that history beginning over half a century ago.

In the early 1900's the St. John's River was the interstate system of the logging world. Here in Central Florida there was a particularly large mill know as the Osceola Sawmill and it milled thousands of cypress and pine trees up annually. The majority of cypress and pine trees today pale in comparison to the size, beauty, and strength of old growth trees that the mill harvested.

Loggers would go out into the vast unharvested timber fields and fell giant pine and cypress trees for transport to the mill. It wasn't easy a hundred years ago. They had no chain saws, motorized loaders, or cranes. They only had good strong backs, axes, saws, oxen, and of course, a raft to get them to the mill.

After felling them, the trees were made into rafts for transport down the river to the mill. Most of the trees floated like small boats down the river. Sometimes however, one of them would become water logged and threaten to sink the whole raft to the bottom. In an effort to save the raft, the "sinker logs" would be cut free and allowed to sink to the bottom of the river. Loggers expected to lose about 20% of their trees this way.

These "sinker logs" found their way into the muck and mire of the St. Johns River and were preserved there for decades.

What was once a profit loss for a big company, cut free and forgotten at the bottom of the river, is now a beautiful and treasured piece of history. Each log combines the unique coloring that can only come from decades under water with river-etched edges and old tight growth rings of trees that have now been logged near extinction.

We have been hard at work rescuing these logs out of the murky waters and milling them up to finally reach their intended destination.

Continue to see how we finish the journey begun over half a century ago...

Continue the Journey on Page 2