The availability of pine timber, not farmland, first attracted early settlers to the St. Croix Valley. Lumber barons were always looking for new sources of quality lumber.

By 1849, when the Minnesota Territory was created, logging was in full swing along the St. Croix River. The river provided the most efficient means of transportation and trees were abundant near the river.

Logging was done predominantly during the winter months when dirt roads could be iced over to carry 20-ton sleighs to the river. An average logging camp kept two dozen horses to drag to and then hoist the logs onto sleds. The horses then hauled the sleds to the riverbanks to wait for spring. With the spring thaw, the lumberjacks drove the logs downriver to sawmills.

Floating downriver was the most economical way to move logs to the saw mills. The wannigan, a barge-like boat, was the headquarters for the drive, serving as a floating cook shack and bunkhouse for the river drivers.

The lumberjacks’ first task at a new site was to clear the area of trees to make room for the camp. Then the campsites were built quickly and roughly.

During the logging season, rustic bunkhouses would house the lumberjacks. The men slept two to a bunk on hay mattresses. In order to ward off bedbugs and body lice, they sometimes lined their bunks with cedar boughs. Their evening social life was mostly comprised of playing cards, smoking and talking.

Being a lumberjack required an enormous amount of labor—which, in turn, required a high-caloric diet of around 5,000 calories per day. The camp cook and assistants worked tirelessly to keep the lumberjacks well-fed. Some records show that breakfast at an 80-man camp included making 400 to 500 pancakes! It has also been reported a day’s baking could easily include making 20 pies or 30 loaves of bread.

Taylors Falls served to supply goods and services to logging camps, and many Taylors Falls residents were owners of logging companies and timber lands.

Log jams were common at Taylors Falls, but the 1886 log jam was the largest. What started the winter logs to roll and pick up speed, can be traced to a feud over the dammed river up on Wisconsin’s Clam Lake. The offended party, whose land flooded with the damming, blew up the Clam River dam with a bit of dynamite, causing the river to start to rise.

At the same time, upriver, heavy rains brought flooding. A log jam at Wood River, at the mouth of Wisconsin’s Namekagon, started moving . . . and fast! The logs went booming down the river toward their final destination in Stillwater. As the logs were slammed down through the narrows of the St. Croix River trap rock at Taylors Falls, they piled up below the current bridge at Angle rock.

The log jam was two miles long, up to 200 feet wide and as high as 100 feet in depth. Two pile drivers, about 100 men and three steamboats, working around the clock, labored to get at the key logs to create a channel to start the logs moving. Ultimately, it took about four weeks before the jam was completely broken. During those four weeks, tourists came by the trainload from the Twin Cities and Duluth.