The white pine forests fell to the logger's ax in the northern Rum River pineries, "Seventy mills in seventy years could not exhaust the white pine I have seen on the Rum River" predicted Daniel Stanchfield, a lumber-wise timber cruiser trained on the Penobscot River in Maine. He made his prediction after climbing tall trees and seeing mile after mile of white pine forest.

The first harvest of timber on the upper Rum River took place in 1820 when soldiers cut and rafted logs downstream to the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers to construct Fort Snelling. In 1844 logs were harvested on The Point to build a trading post on the east bank of the Rum River. Stanchfield's report lured loggers and lumber barons to the Rum. In 1847 the first commercially harvested logs from the Rum River were collected in a boom at The Point. Unfortunately, the boom broke and those logs were lost down the Mississippi River.

From 1850 to 1890 the great white pine forests along the Rum River were harvested each winter. The logs were driven down the river each spring by "river pigs" or river drivers to be caught in log booms stretched across the Rum River at The Point. Here the log met the saw as mills turned the logs into lumber for farm buildings, businesses and homes from Anoka to New Orleans. A portable sawmill once operated at The Point. Five sawmills once operated in Anoka.

The vast timber resources of the Rum River were depleted in less than forty years.

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Show me all markers in:  Anoka, MN  |  Anoka County  |  55303  |  Minnesota  |  United States of America

Where Cultures Meet
Fireman's Grove
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Highway of Exploration
Circle of Life
Where Land and Water Meet
Bridging the Mississippi
Louis Hennepin
The Gathering Place
Why Settle Here? / Time to Play

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