Yellow birch log boom with Pointer Boat in background, [ca. 1915]

This picture was found in the Ontario Public Archives

E. J. Zavitz
Black and white print
Reference Code: RG 1-448-1, 358
Archives of Ontario, I0006763

Yellow birch, unlike the wide-ranging white birch, occurs only in a relatively narrow belt extending from the upper Great Lakes eastward to the Atlantic seaboard. But it lives longer and grows larger than its pale-skinned cousin, and furniture and flooring manufacturers covet its richly coloured wood. (I once spent a winter felling yellow birches using a two-man crosscut saw, and as noon hour neared, the salmon-pink sawdust thrown out in the snow by the saw looked good enough to scoop up and eat). In the Second World War, yellow birch veneer, a substitute for scarce aluminum, flew into battle as the skin of swift DeHaviland Mosquito intruder aircraft built in Toronto.

When Edmund Zavitz snapped this photograph, commercial use of yellow birch was hitting its stride. The first wave of lumbering in Ontario combed the woods clear of white pine. Pine is unexcelled for a multitude of uses, and it is buoyant, making it possible to float the timber down rivers to distant sawmills. White pine and yellow birch share the same forest region (although preferring different localized moisture and soil regimes), but the 19th-century lumber barons bypassed any yellow birch stands encountered in their westward pursuit of pine.

In the early 20th century, sawmills utilizing hardwood trees, notably oak, maple and yellow birch, began setting up shop beside railway lines threading the southern flank of the Precambrian shield. Heavy hardwood sawlogs were best sleigh-hauled overland to the mills, but some lumbermen were hard to wean from their dependence on cheap water transport. Dumped straight into the water, a birch sawlog had less than a 50 per cent chance of staying afloat until it reached the mill. So lumbermen resorted to partially peeling logs and leaving them to dry out somewhat before “watering” them (strips and patches of bare wood are visible on many of the logs in the photograph). Another tactic was to add buoyant pine or cedar logs to the mix, and attach each birch to a “floater” by means of a short length of wire or light chain attached to pointed iron “dogs” driven into their flanks.

Still, wherever birch logs were “boomed up” (as in the picture) to await their appointment with a sawmill’s screeching blades, slow but steady sinkage continued. Today, log salvagers hunt down these booming grounds and haul up long-submerged timber for manufacturing into trendy “old growth” flooring and furniture.

The man in the foreground holds a pike pole, a sort of shepherd’s crook with which river drivers pushed and pulled floating logs into position. The 12-foot-long handle is armed with a head much like that of a boat hook, except that the iron tip and hook are sharply pointed. In the background is a “pointer boat,” another universal tool of the log drive. Perfected on the Ottawa River and propelled by four oarsmen, its wooden hull was uniquely shaped to plough through masses of floating sawlogs, and safely run rapids. Farther still in the background, and faintly visible near the left margin of the picture, is an “alligator,” a steam-powered warping tug designed to winch masses of floating logs across lakes such as this.

Photographer Edmund John Zavitz, born in 1875 at Ridgeway in Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula, was the first professional forester to be hired by the Ontario government. He credited his Devonshire-born grandfather for opening his eyes to the wonders of nature, during countryside walks. Following graduation from McMaster University (1903) and further studies in forestry at Yale and Michigan universities, he joined the faculty of Guelph Agricultural College. There, Zavitz began experimenting with growing trees for reforestation. In 1909, he joined the Ontario Department of Lands, Forests and Mines, and immediately started a provincial tree nursery in Norfolk County, where tracts of worn out and windblown former farmland begged for reforestation. This was the first of a network of government tree nurseries established across the province.

As Provincial Forester, Zavitz also supervised forest protection and forest inventory programs. Following a disastrous forest fire in Northeastern Ontario in which many people died, he helped frame the Forest Fires Prevention Act of 1917, a landmark step toward organized forest fire control in the province. Seven years later, he was involved in another modernization move, the addition of aircraft to the department’s arsenal.

Edmund Zavitz remained active in his chosen field to at least age 80. In the 1950s, he “wrote the book” on reforestation (Fifty Years of Reforestation in Ontario), as well as a 60-page, profusely illustrated work titled Hardwood Trees of Ontario. A stated purpose of the latter was to create for posterity a photographic record of a disappearing phenomenon — hardwood trees in their largest and finest form. During his long career he assembled a library of photographs of exceptional trees — as well as such detail as the leaves, fruit and bark of each species. This booklet, published by the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests in 1959, is a picture gallery of Ontario’s hardwoods looking their best. It is assumed he did most, or all, of the photography himself. His prize yellow birch picture is of a giant measuring 46 inches across the stump, photographed in Algonquin Park in 1922.

John Macfie, August 2007
retired Ontario government employee and author
Parry Sound