Transcript

Location: 1218 Copeland Park Dr.

Howard Fredricks (interviewer): Where were the lumber factories?

William Koch: What we called the Big Mill—it’s now—uh, later called Copeland—uh, Copeland Mill because Copeland was, I guess, one of the main stockholders of it, and it is now Copeland Park. Then came the Big Mill, which was directly below that. And then just south of the, uh, Milwaukee Railroad Bridge on the east side of the river—Black River—was Trow’s Mill, and directly across—directly across the river from there, uh, was a mill called Row’s Mill. That and the railroads provided most of the laboring work and, you know, support for the city. Now the, uh, lumber mill, like I said, they paid—the average was about a dollar a day. And the only ones that really got a half-way decent, uh, wages were those that were riding the carriages and running the gang saws. They got a higher rate of pay. And the saw filers—they got a higher rate of pay.

And they had two jack ways coming up into the mill, see, which meant that there was two men feeding logs up on jack ways and they had two carriages in each mill. These carriages, was—as a log would come up into the mill and would go along on a chain, you know, like a belt, you know, feeding the log along, you know. When it would get up to this carriage, they would reach down with a couple of clamps, heat-operated levers. There were two men on a carriage, and they’d operate levers. And those clamps, they would go down and grab the log and pull it up and clamp it tight into the carriage. Then there was a circular saw running a little further down. And, uh, this carriage was run by steam, see. And a steam cylinder there. And, uh, it had a long rod on it, you know, and then as soon as he had the log clamped onto the carriage, he’d start the carriage towards that saw, that big circular saw, see. And it was up to him to judge what kind of lumber, and how thick and, you know, he should cut out of that log. He was the man that had to judge what that log would make, and he didn’t have much time to do it! Hurry—everything was a hurry-up! And he’d run the carriage down again that saw and it would saw off a slab there and just nothing flat, you know. He would go back—he would go back and just like a shot and come right back and cut another one. He would operate a couple of levers and he’d move the log out an inch or two or whatever he thought ought to come off of there and he would saw that off. It would fall onto a chain and the chain would carry it down further where they would cut it in uniform lengths, you see, on a big chain. Everybody was on the jump all the time. It was just a race from the time the whistle blew in the morning until six o’clock at night.