Chapter 24

School was starting next week, the summerfolk were leaving with the typical fluster and bluster of the Chicago rich.

"Ed?" Seph was worried.

"What?"

"Someone has been in the house."

"Is there anything missing?"

"Not that I can find."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Tell me about it."

"Missy and I came home from the Antler and there was this feeling that someone or something had walked through the house and across the street."

The past two years had been the life of a simple town. The Antler was a booming business now that the Chicagoans had come to roost during the summer. Ed had dickered with the Mears' about the piece of land the Mill was on.

He knew the day of first growth trees was coming to an end. There were fewer and fewer log rafts coming down the river and the trees were of lesser quality. The Timber Cruisers were finding trees farther afield now.

Felling; the cutting of trees in the woods, had switched from a summer job to a winter one. A man cleared his land for farming and floated the excess trees to a mill and sold them. Now, trees were felled and hauled to the river with huge teams of oxen...

Originally, the log rafts were made up on the ice, the outside logs chained together by two inch thick linked chain fastened to big spikes driven deep into the logs. Other trees were felled and lined up in rows between the chained perimeter logs. By leaving slack in the chains the log raft could follow the twists, turns and bends in the river. The rafts were floated to the mill and lumber was sawn from the logs.

Chicago was still rebuilding from the fire and the new way carpenters had figured out was causing a demand in dimensional lumber.

The new way of building was to construct a wall of footer, studs and header. The window layout was built into the studding. Nail four of the walls in a box on a floor of wide boards, put up rafters and roof boards and cover it with shingles. By nailing support boards cut into the walls to keep the wall square and siding over the four walls the box was now, "in the dry" and ready to be insulated and lathed so the plasters, mud-men, could make smooth walls and there you have it ... a home ... sure there were inside walls and other things to do, but it was a better use of the tree than the way houses used to be built.

The old way used square timbers to make the corners of the house, beams were laid on top of the corners and long one inch thick boards were nailed vertically on to the the beams. Then the siding was nailed on, a roof system put in place and then they preceded as above. Most of the time lath and plaster weren't used. The house was held up by the beams, the vertical boards were a base for the siding.

The dimensional lumber used far less wood and the work was mostly done on the flat deck of the floor. It doesn't look like it, but semi skilled labor could build the basic body of a stick built house, while it took a real master to lay out and build a post and beam house.

Timbers for timber built houses left a lot of scrap, generally used more trees and took a long time to dry. But a reasonable sized house could be built with the dimensional lumber of a couple of first growth pines. Timber houses were stronger but took a long time to build.

Time was what Chicago didn't have. By the time Chicago was 'in the dry, ' lessons had been learned and errors corrected with new ideas. The dimensional lumber home became the house of the future and, in a few years, the law of the land.

Brick homes of the time were an entirely different animal, but soon a brick facing over frame construction became the coming thing.

It was down to logs arriving at the mill on sailing ships ... locally built and manned ... bring timber to the mill, pick up lumber and head for Chicago ... and anywhere there was a need for homes.

Timber baron Mears had made a pile ... if the scrap wasn't sold as firewood, the junk was tossed in the lake where it sank ... eventually. Soon there were sawmills on every lake with access to the Big Lake and the time of huge profit was over.

Mears died, the heir had no interest in keeping the pile ... she was more interested in spending it. The clearcut land was sold to farmers and Edmond got the land under the Mill. The old mill had a legacy, a drying shed with a thick concrete floor that had stood the test of 70 years of banging and dropping tons of timbers.

There was even a Stuckenholz Steam Gantry crane imported from Germany to lift the tons of lumber after they dried. A Lake schooner docked at the mill pier and the full gantry crane picked up huge stacks of dry and took them to the pier where men manhandled the lumber into the hold. Ed had ideas for the crane.

Eventually, a full service boat yard was built where the mill once stood. Slips were built and rented ... the once booming Mill became a booming yacht marina with enclosed winter storage ... if you could pay the freight, as they say. Weather storage was much cheaper.