The Lumberjack World Championships happen every year in Hayward, Wisconsin in the state’s Northwoods. Why? WUWM speaks with historian Willa Hammitt Brown to find out more about the logging industry in that area and how it inspired competitive lumberjacking, also known as timbersports. Brown is the author of the book: Gentlemen in the Woods: Manhood, Myth and the American Lumberjack.
At the turn of the 20th century, logging was at its height in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin and the northern part of Minnesota. The area was covered in old white pine. According to Brown, the logging of that land resulted in one of the biggest transformations of the American landscape in American history.
“And it really is what allowed the Midwest to flourish,” she says. “Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Omaha — all of these cities are built with Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan Northwoods white pine.”
Logging really was an extremely male profession, says Brown. “To the point where women were banned in most camps. Women were seen as possible distractions and possible ways of tearing apart the camps.”
“Towards the end of the 19th century, you've got these camps of 80 to 150 men working together — and so drinking and gambling — and women are banned and seen as ways to lower morale.” She says in some camps, the foreman's wife was the cook, and there was such a thing as “cookies,” the cook’s assistants.
How did logging inspire timber sports — that kind of competitive lumberjacking?
“It’s a really interesting story,” says Brown, “because it’s also the story of how we changed.”
She says lumberjacking still happens in modern times. “Forestry today requires much more specialized knowledge of machinery than it does of shimmying up logs or ‘log burling,’” she explains. “That’s the log rolling in a river. Those skills are attached to a largely dead form of the industry. They’re attached to a sort of nostalgic late 19th-, early 20th-century idea of what lumbering was.”
She notes the Peshtigo Fire, in northeastern Wisconsin, including parts of Door County, devastated huge swaths of the landscape and may have killed up to 1,200 people.
“And in Wisconsin in particular, in the 1930s, there was actually a second Dust Bowl that no one talks about, which was in the cutover region of northern Wisconsin — the area we’re talking about.”
“So you have these economically devastated regions also damaged by fire. There’s not a lot that’s easy to recover industry-wise around there because pine grows in sandy soil, and sandy soil doesn’t make for great farming soil,” says Brown.
So the region turned to tourism as a way to recover, she notes. “And, you know, still, if you’ve ever spent a beautiful weekend at the Apostle Islands, you know that northern Wisconsin is a lovely place to go as a tourist.”
But by the 1930s and ’40s, there starts being a lot of nostalgia for this work, including fairs with reenactments. “And that’s where you start seeing timber sports really take off. It’s a celebration of raw — really raw — masculine strength and skill,” explains Brown.
She says there were log burling competitions happening in the late 19th century around Michigan and Minnesota. “And some of those were actual lumberjacks sort of showing off in the summer. And they started being money — made out of that.”
But she says competitive lumberjacking really takes off, “When we get the full-blown nostalgia for the old, ye oldie lumberjack-y. And that nostalgia bears very little resemblance to the actual industry [which included poor workers with very little way up].”
So now that you know about the history of logging and also competitive lumberjacking, how did Hayward’s Lumberjack World Championships start? They started in 1960, and the organization put out this information about its history several years ago.
