You need to imagine the snow. The ice-slicked logging roads. And, of course, the stench of wet, sweaty wool and unwashed lumberjacks in closed quarters.
"There are 70 men here who haven't taken a bath in three months," says Mike Adams, a costumed interpreter at the Forest History Center in Grand Rapids, Minn. Don't forget they ate a lot of beans and prunes, too.
A team of interpreters leads visitors through a logging camp as if it were Dec. 15, 1900, when there were 300 camps across the northern woods. Lumberjacks took down enough lumber to build a 9-foot-wide boardwalk around the world at the equator.
"It was a heyday," says John Grabko, another interpreter. "Never before or after has as much lumber come out of the woods."
Interpreters explain the camp's various jobs as if onlookers were applying for positions such as road monkeys (building roads and icing them for log-laden sleighs), cookies (slinging 500 pancakes each morning, plus potatoes, pies and sausages), saw sharpeners and blacksmiths. The actual lumberjacks — often father-son duos or brothers — had to drop 17 to 20 trees a day, often making 90 to 100 cuts in the process.
More than a century has passed since those forests were clear-cut and logs clogged the Mississippi River shore-to-shore as it thawed each spring. Trucks stacked with tree trunks do still rumble along Hwy. 169, and up to 5,000 loads may be stockpiled outside Blandin Paper Co. in town.
The view from atop a 100-foot 1934 fire tower at Forest History Center sweeps across Grand Rapids as wind whips above the trees. Sun glints off lakes and the Mississippi, providing glimpses of blue between deep-green trees. It sparks a yearning for a beach, and a nod of gratitude that the logging camp's winter scenario is pure imagination.
Area attractions
The Judy Garland Museum celebrates Grand Rapids' most famous resident, Frances "Baby" Gumm, who starred as Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939. A photo of her as a grinning preschooler dancing in a homemade white net dress sits on the piano of her family's Grand Rapids home, where she lived until age 5. The restored house connects to the museum, with an Emerald City carriage, thousands of "Oz" souvenirs, replica ruby red slippers and poignant exhibits on the hard-worked star who was given uppers as young as 14. She died in 1969 from an overdose of sleeping pills at age 47. She claimed that her only carefree years were in Minnesota.
