Fred Lynch retired in 2018 after capturing images for the Southeast Missourian since 1975, in that time moving from black-and-white to color, from film to digital and to video. The blog title is a nod to an earlier era of news photography and the 4x5 Speed Graphic: It's more important to be there for the shot than to worry about technical details.

Logging on the River

Posted Monday, June 20, 2011, at 6:00 AM

Aug. 7, 1956 Southeast Missourian

On the way to the mill, this huge raft of logs, bound for one of the lumber processing plants at Caruthersville, is shown after it passed under the traffic bridge late Monday on the way down the Mississippi River. Lumbermen here report such rafts are not infrequent sights along the stream, but this one was one of the largest in recent months. The rafts are made up along the wooded sections of the Missouri River. (G.D. Fronabarger photo)

Comments

View 4 comments or respond

Community discussion is important, and we encourage you to participate as a reader and commenter. Click here to see our Guidelines. We also encourage registered users to let us know if they see something inappropriate on our site. You can do that by clicking "Report Comment" below.

I thought this was a link to Frony's famous blog - Blogging on the River.

My bad.

-- Posted by bobby62914 on Mon, Jun 20, 2011, at 5:59 PM
Up until a few weeks ago, I would have said that I had never seen one of these log rafts on the Mississippi.

As it turned out, I was editing some photos I had taken of a Mississippi River baptism in New Madrid in 1967 and saw one in the background.

http://www.capecentralhigh.com/cape-photos/log-rafts-and-baptisms/

The one I saw wasn't as big, but it's still pretty amazing that logs were once delivered to sawmills this way.

-- Posted by ksteinhoff on Mon, Jun 20, 2011, at 10:06 PM
It seems as if that might be a good way to deliver logs to the chip mill at the port?

-- Posted by Hugh M Bean on Tue, Jun 21, 2011, at 11:31 AM
When I got out of the Army in 1946, I went to work at the mill in Caruthersville, MO. "Dillman's Mill". My first job was on the deck unhooking the cable tongs from the logs after a steam derreck lifted them from the river, I also worked to split the bark off of the short sections after they came from the saw that cut them up to about 4 ft. sections. After the bark was removed the log then went to the veneer lathes and was cut into sheets about 1/4 inch thick. These sheets were stacked in open air stackes with about 1 in. seperations, allowing them to air dry. The mill shipped them out to various places mostly by truck.

They were used to make crates such as egg crates, etc.

-- Posted by Retired93 on Wed, Jun 22, 2011, at 8:01 PM

Respond to this blog

Posting a comment requires a subscription.