SRHS
Steamboat Rock Historical Society
Natural Resources
WOOD FOR LUMBER AND FUEL
The History of Hardin County states that “Clay township was undoubtedly the most heavily timbered township in the county, being about half covered with heavy timber.”
It seems hard to believe today, but much of this timber was cut used and even sold as firewood in those early years of settlement.
One of the industries of Clay Township was that of buying and shipping firewood. The business was owned by four men; T.J. Dickey, S.F. Lathrop, owner of the flour mill; D.W. Turner, and Nelson Biglow. The business began in 1870. Their shipments averaged about a thousand cords per year and employed about seven men to chop, split and haul the wood to market.
One of the prerequisites of the pioneer in a prairie state was the availability of fuel and building material.
So the country around Steamboat Rock had in the vast river valley woodlands a resource uncommon on the prairie country.
These woods were unique in variety. They ran from white pine to southern sycamore. Most common the oaks, elms, hickory, walnut, locust, poplar, and basswood, though there were many others. Among the undergrowth were raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, grapes, and occasional thickets of plum, crabapple and the haws. It also yielded herbs for the pioneers medicine and plenty of game for his larder.
These woods were divided into wood lots of from five to ten acres, cut off, and then left to revert for taxes or to be sold to someone assembling some of these acres for pasture when the “barbed wire law” came and open grazing was no longer permissible.
Undoubtedly, Steamboat Rock’s first homes were built from logs cut on the spot. Later many of the trees were sawn into lumber at several water powered mills located above and below the town on the river. Many of the farmers’ barns had huge hewn sills and timbers for their framework which was set up at “barn raising”. If any of the lumber was planed it was done by hand.
Some of Steamboat Rock’s first houses had walnut siding, hand shaved shingles, and thin split boards for lath. The woods around also furnished ties of Steamboat’s railroad.
Herbert Quick’s family seems to have had many poor experiences with the early housing in the area. Born near Steamboat Rock, Quick described some of the homes his family lived in after they arrived in his book One Man’s Life.
“The Doubting Castle had a roof of sort, but it left much to be desired, since my mother here, as she told me, lay with my newborn sister Stella in her arms and held the baby to her breast to keep her warm in
the bitter winter night; and looking up through the roof at the stars, was able to draw from this vision of other suns than ours a comforting faith in the Ruler of all things.”
“Comfort was at a premium then; for the winters were very severe ones, even for people with opaque roofs. This was at the very end of February, 1859. It was either this winter or that of 1858 that the last
of the Elk in that part of the state were killed. The snow was so deep the settlers were able to walk on snowshoes up to the Elk, confined in their hard-tramped yards in the snow, and kill them with axes and
clubs–and I for one do not blame them for it, for meat was meat…
“From this log house, the family moved to the James Reynolds farm out on the edge of Grundy County, where I was born…
“This was not a log house, and I may therefore claim to be a true son of the prairie. The people who built log houses along our rivers were merely the last of the forest dwellers. It was only when a family left the woods, pushed out into the grassy plains and built a house of boards–or afterward of sod–that they were really initiated into the Grand Order of the Open Sky.
Herbert Quick’s boyhood home on the edge of Gurndy county near Steamboat Rock.
It was Quick’s opinion that the pioneers were not yet used to prairie life and had not yet learned to build houses that were suitable to the open prairies. “The house on the Fuller Place was a frame structure and seemed very large to me. It had two rooms below and two, as I remember it, in the second story. The siding was made of basswood, sawed at a mill on the Iowa River, at a place called Hardin City, I believe–one of the numerous lost
metropolises of the real estate booms of the ‘fifties. The basswood was unpainted, and when we lived there, one could almost poke his finger through it. At the head of my bed was a hole burned through this siding where some one had placed a candle on a girt of the frame and set the clapboards on fire. The second story, you note, was not lathed or plastered.”
“We moved there when I was three and a half years old, and I slept in this basswood-sided unplastered shell of a house at times when the mercury froze in the thermometer–or would have done so if we had had such a thing. In one of these winters the hides of cattle froze and fell off afterward, leaving great sores. When the
northwesters blew in January, going to bed was a great deed; but it was something ameliorated by a hot board which my mother would lay between the sheets for a while beforehand. Getting up had no mitigation. Sometimes there would be snow on the bed, and worse still, on the floor. Into it I would step gingerly with my
bare feet and scamper shivering downstairs, to find my clothes and shoes where I had left them by the hot stove the night before.”
“Our greatest hardships as prairie pioneers in Iowa were bad housing for both the people and their live stock. We tried to build the same sort of houses to which we had been accustomed in the timber. When we pushed out on the prairies, log houses and sheds were not to be had. So we tried out the miserable lumber sawed from the basswood and oak out of the fringe of a forest along the river. We did not yet know how to use the materials found on every new farm. We might have taken the sod made by our breaking plows, laid them up into walls, plastered them with mud outside and in, roofed the low houses with overhanging coverings of boards, and given ourselves houses as warm as any in the world; but we had not learned this. So it happened that, with no coal and only wood hauled from the timber, the great cold waves and blizzards of every severe winter froze people to death in their beds and destroyed their live stock. I have heard my father relate that after one of these storms he saw hogs frozen to death, standing up in the snow. Peculiar to the settlement of the prairies.”
Little building material and fuel are still taken from the timberlands along the river. Perhaps these woods greatest future lies in the timeless tranquility they offer. What better way to appreciate the woods than to take a walk into the woods and take in there beauty.