TANBARK PEELERS AND KNOT BUMPERS

Warren Times Mirror and Observer June 9, 1973

From the Memoirs of Harry Jefferson

“As a boy at home, I’ve seen as high as 25 or 30 teams of horses go by our house in a day going to Arroyo or Portland Mills.” In these words the late Harry Paul Jefferson began describing some of the earlier, life-long experiences in the forests of the Allegheny Plateau.

The teams that Jeff saw passing by his house as a boy were pulling wagons loaded with hemlock bark for the tanneries. Each wagon was fitted with a sort of cradle made of stakes. The stakes fitted into holes in the bottom of the wagon bed. According to Jeff, they piled the bark “way above the stakes; as high as they could get it. That made a tremendous load. They moved all of that bark out before bad weather came in the fall.”

Jeff remembered other ways of getting the bark out of the woods, too. “On steep hillsides, they ran their bark off in chutes.” The chutes were flat-bottom troughs made of wood, down which the bark would slide. Another method used was the two-horse dray—a slide-like affair about ten feet long that “would haul a cord and a half or two cords.”

Hemlock bark is rich in tannic acid, a necessary ingredient for the tanning of leather. In the use of the early forests, hemlock bark was a valuable product. In most instances, it had far more value than the logs that could be cut from the tree.

Moving the bark was quite a chore when you consider that each piece had to be loaded and unloaded by hand. No mechanical equipment existed for handling it.

Bark peeler moved into the woods early in the year, according to Jeff. “They peeled bark from the 15th of May—depending on an early or late spring—until the 25th of July, depending on how wet or dry the season was. The latter part of July, the bark would tighten (on the trees) and you couldn’t depend on every tree being used.

“Most bark was peeled on a piecework basis. As I remember, we got around a dollar and a half or a dollar and seventy-five cents a day. (We worked a five-man crew) two men on the crosscut saw, felling and cutting logs; on man ‘fitting’ the bark; one man spudding (peeling the bark). The fifth man turned the log and bumped the knots. That’s butting the knots flush with the tree using a double bit ace. The weight of a double bit ace in bark peeling day ran from 3 to 4½ pounds.

“When the bark peeling was over, the bark peelers, as a rule, went out to town. In the ‘teens on through the early ‘thirties, there would be in Sheffield as high as 300 lumber jacks (converging) on that town in 24 hours, all with their money. And they had it. They were paid by the cord (of bark). They were paid by check. They weren’t paid in gold.”

Courtesy of the Warren County Historical Society