The St. Croix Boom Site is a historic and scenic wayside on the St. Croix River in Stillwater Township, Minnesota, United States. It commemorates the location of a critical log boom where, from 1856 to 1914, timber from upriver was sorted and stored before being dispatched to sawmills downstream. The site was developed as a roadside park along Minnesota State Highway 95 in the 1930s. In 1966 it was designated a National Historic Landmark for its national significance in the theme of industry. It was nominated for being the earliest, most important, and longest serving of the log storage and handling operations that supported Minnesota's major logging industry. Virtually no traces remain of the site's original buildings and structures.
Origin
The vast white pine forests of the St. Croix River Valley became a major target for logging in the mid-19th century. The St. Croix and its tributaries provided easy transport downstream. Moreover, the St. Croix flowed directly into the Mississippi River, making a convenient route to the burgeoning communities all down the length of the nation plus the numerous inland settlements they served. Since multiple logging companies sent their timber down the same waterway, each company had a distinctive "timber mark" or "owner's mark" they stamped into the bottom of each log. In the 1830s and 40s the St. Croix harvest was collected and sorted downstream on an honor system, but the increasing number of companies and logs soon necessitated a more official approach.
In 1851 the Minnesota Legislature chartered the St. Croix Boom Company, granting them the right to collect all logs at a certain point on the river, sort them according to mark, and deliver them to the appropriate owners in return for 40 cents per thousand board feet (17 cent/m3). The Boom Company's leadership was largely composed of men from Marine, Taylors Falls, and Osceola, so the boom was initially located near Taylors Falls. However, there were two major problems with this. One was that this was upstream from the mouth of the Apple River, the St. Croix's second-most productive tributary. The other was that Stillwater was already becoming the region's primary lumber town, and mills there had to pay extra to have their logs timber rafted downstream.
In 1856 the Boom Company ran into financial trouble, so a syndicate of Stillwater-based lumbermen led by Isaac Staples seized their opportunity to purchase and relocate the operation. Staples, familiar with log booms from his native Maine, picked an ideal site for the new boom. It was north of Stillwater in a stretch of the river that was narrow, high-banked, and naturally divided into multiple channels by small islands.
Operation
The St. Croix Log Boom used a series of booms—logs chained end-to-end across the river—to catch timber as it floated downstream. Workers called "boom rats" moved among the booms on catwalks, noting the timber marks stamped on the incoming logs and sorting them into holding pens. When enough of one brand were gathered, the boom workers would form them into a timber raft, which a "fitting-up crew" would steer downstream to the correct mill. Some receiving mills were as far south as St. Louis.
The boom operation was designed in such a way that it could handle both heavy and light volumes efficiently. In mid-summer logs could be backed up for above the boom, and hundreds of workers put in long days. However, in slow times the whole operation could run with a skeleton crew, leading to considerable labor savings.
In 1890 the Boom Company completed the Nevers Dam upstream from Taylors Falls to control the flow of logs even further and to prevent log jams like the 1886 St. Croix River log jam that had disrupted the business.
Impact
The massive volume of logs on the river and the centrality of the St. Croix Boom Company to the all-important lumber industry led to major regional impacts. At peak times the log-choked river was impassable to steamboats. Travelers couldn't move upstream or downstream, farmers couldn't ship their goods to market, and towns like Taylors Falls were starved economically. Jumbles of logs could block drainage, flooding riverside farms and homes. The Boom Company did endeavor to provide teams and wagons to portage passengers and goods around blocked areas, transferring them to small steamboats upstream so they could continue their journeys. In the 1860s and 70s the company worked on a shipping canal to bypass the boom site.