Getting the wood

One job on our farm that was always left for winter was that of “getting the wood out”. Since we had only one stove, the kitchen range, it was not a momentous task to gather the eight or so cords needed to put us over the winter. Yet the whole process seemed laborious and slow. For whatever reason, we never managed to get to the woods in the fall ahead of the snow or to cut the wood a year in advance. It was always a last-minute kind of event carried out in deep snow with green wood for burning being the order of the day.

It was about half a mile back to our woods, a distance travelled by horse and woodsleigh, equipped with cross-cut saw, bucksaw, axes and two or three men. For comfort on the way in, the passengers sat leaning against one of the stakes on the flat-bottomed sleigh. Choosing a cluster of trees and blazing out a roadway was the first assignment. Trees were felled, junked and piled near that roadway and loaded onto the sleigh in roughly eight-foot lengths. A tidy sleigh load was considered a third of a cord and three such loads a day to the house was counted fair going. ‘

Dad loved the forest and everything connected with the slow Process of procuring the winter wood. His Valley homestead had an excellent range of woodland and while he still lived there he worked a lot in the forest, not just for stove wood but also in cutting special timbers which were loaded on railway flat cars. AS Well, his years in the New England states had been spent in the woods, lumber yards or carpentry. He was an excellent