Additional things I learned in Virginia

And a few notes from an R.R. Bailey interview

According to the Virginia Enterprise (July 14, 1949), Virginia was “hacked out of a veritable untouched wilderness of white pine in 1892”. A local named John Owen built a lumber mill on the lakeshore, but it burned down in 1893. Moon and Kerr then built and operated the “Finlayson mill”, which burned in 1900, taking much of the town with it.

W.T. Bailey was born in in 1843 in Baileysville, Ontario (Trygg 1966. 2). His son Richard R. Bailey was born in Grand Haven Michigan, where the father operated a “small portable sawmill”, in 1875. When this mill burned in 1880, Bailey moved to Oneota, just south of Duluth on the St. Louis River, and started a new mill. He sold this mill in 1885 to the Duluth Lumber Company (2).

Between 1885 and 1895, the Baileys logged along the Rainy River and delivered logs to a boom at the mouth of the river near Rainy Lake. The customers were Canadian lumber mills operating out of Rat Portage (now Kenora). There was no duty on logs taken into Canada at this time. Camps of about 100 men each operated each winter; most of the loggers were North Dakota wheat farmers, so there was little labor organizing (3). According to Bailey, the “timber averaged 4 logs to the thousand [board feet] which you never hear of anything like that nowadays.” During this period logs were still being driven down the Little Fork and Big Fork rivers to Rainy Lake – the Virginia and Rainy Lake Railroad was built later.

Interesting environmental note: Bailey said “you know, those rivers don’t look the same as they did back 50 years ago to me. I don’t recognize them. You could take a big wide wanigan, 16 feet wide and float it down the rivers then, where now you can’t get down with a canoe. When the country is all cut off it takes the water off so fast, that there is no water in summer. When the timber was there, the water didn’t seep up; you had good rivers, good water” (5). Returning to this point later (and answering the question I asked a couple of days ago), Bailey said “They took out billions of feet of timber tributary to the St. Louis River, which reached up to what is now Babbitt, and around in there, and up in Biwabik. They put logs in the lake there at Biwabik and floated them down. The St. Louis River then would float logs. I don’t think you could float a rowboat down there now, but it was a great big river. I’ve seen the drive that would take three days…to go by the bridge at Whiteface River or St. Louis River, and the logs coming just as thick as they could pass under the bridge there…That would reach into the Partridge River and all those rivers tributary to the St. Louis River, Embarrass, Partridge, and all of them.”

(The St. Louis River from Babbitt to Oneota)

After logging for Moon and Kerr for a couple of years, W.T. Bailey and his son built their mill on Lake Virginia in 1895 and it survived the 1900 fire. They expanded it in 1907. In 1902, Plummer and Ash built what became the Virginia & Rainy Lake (VRL) mill on the shore of Silver Lake. According to the newspaper account, average employment at the mill during its peak years was about 1,500.

(W.T. Bailey mill, with VRL in the lefthand background)

VRL operated 150 logging camps and about 150 miles of main RR line, “plus almost 1,500 miles of ever-changing spurs – meandering through hills and spanning swamps, following the contours of the land into almost every corner of the North Country. Lakes from which logs were hoisted onto cars included Namakan, Kabetogama, Elbow, Black Duck, Johnson, Beaudoin, Ash, Elephant, and Echo.” (Minnesota Logging Railroads, 126)

In 1918 the Virginia & Rainy Lake Company owned 14 locomotives, 345 logging cars…ten rail-mounted log loaders…One winter it leased over 20 locomotives, bringing its total in the woods to 37.” (127) The VRL “employed a year-round average of about 1,700 men in the woods. In the key period from October 1 to April 1, however, some 3,000 to 4,000 men would be working in the forests.” The average wage was $1.68 for a ten-hour day.

(Logs being dumped into Silver Lake from rail cars loaded in the woods.)

The final log passed through the VRL mill on October 9, 1929 at 4:19 PM. Most workers went to Oregon, another newer Edward Hines operation.

R. R. Bailey tells a story of Weyerhaeuser visiting Virginia when he was young, talking about a deal he had just done that he said “was the best deal he had ever made in his life. He bought all the land, all the timberlands of the Northern Pacific Railroad for $6,000,000… and those are the lands now being operated by all the Weyerhauser [sic] interests out in Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Oregon” (Trygg, 10). This must have been between the Panic of 1893 and about 1900.

(Map of VRL landholdings. Virginia is in the lower center.)