Iowa Almanac
Iowa Almanac -- Friday, August 09, 2024
Rolling on the river. More from the Iowa Almanac in a moment. Eat up the summer with an Iowa Soybean Association farmer membership powered by the soybean check-off. Access timely industry info, engage in on-farm research, and join producer programs all designed to support your operations' unique needs. Activate or confirm your membership before August 31st to be entered to win one of many unique prizes, including a solo stove. Visit iasoybeans.com today to learn more. The Iowa Soybean Association, driven to deliver for Iowa's nearly 37,000 soybean farmers. Many communities settled next to rivers as sources for much of what we need to survive. Those rivers also became key transportation outlets. For example, the first rafting on the Mississippi River was done by lead miners, who constructed platforms from logs to float the lead to St. Louis. The earliest lumbering came from Wisconsin, where log rafts and sawed lumber rafts were sent downstream to Galena and Dubuque. Directing the rafts of logs was done with long poles. In the early days of floating logs and lumber down the Mississippi in the middle 1800s, there were five rapids pilots living at Leclerc, who were kept busy piloting floating rafts over the Rock Island rapids. In 1874, small steamboats were first used to guide the rafts, and that meant even larger rafts with more lumber. The largest rafts at that point were more than five blocks long, containing up to three million feet of lumber. By the late 1800s, hardly a day went by in Dubuque when at least one raft was not stopped at a sawmill, or pushed ahead to another mill downstream. In fact, the W.J. Young Mill in Clinton was the world's largest for a time. But with the 20th century, it became cheaper to have the timber sawed in the north where it was harvested and shipped south as planks, and that brought to an end the practice of sending logs as a raft downriver, along with, overcutting of northern forests, reducing the supply. Under the guidance of a boat named the Atumwa Belle, the last raft of logs passed beneath the Dunleith and Dubuque Bridge through the city of Dubuque to a mill downstream on this date in 1915. And that's Iowa Almanac for August 9th. Follow us on Twitter @IowaAlmanac. Until Monday, I'm Jeff Stein.