Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Dudley
With how hard people worked back then, if they did have chainsaws there wouldn't be a tree still standing.
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most people do not realize there hardly was a tree left- by the beginning of the 20th century 2/3 of the forest in the US had been removed -
i have a photograph of Losey Hill from that period - looking down the valley and there is hardly a tree insight, now days it nearly all woodlands.
The Catskills were denuded, a fact bemoaned by the earliest trout conservationists. Log rafts were built on the ice and floated down the Delaware in the spring.
If you go to the Adirondack's museum in Blue Mountain Lake they have a logging exhibit that shows all but the most rugged areas of the mountains cleared-
I would say it was not the lack of power in the saw that left a few stands but instead the difficult terrain that prohibited getting the logs out.
find any old growth in the eastern US and you will see why it was left