Third Floor: Logging & the Lumber Camp

Rooms 7, 8, 9 · Filed under The Tour

Maple sugaring and logging have always gone together in the Adirondack region. A sugarbush is a working forest, and the same families who tapped maple trees in the spring spent the rest of the year managing those forests — clearing, thinning, harvesting timber. The museum's third floor is given over to that other side of the maple story: the tools, the buildings, and the lives of the regional logging industry.

Room 7 — Logging Tools

Room 7 is the museum's collection of historical logging tools — axes, saws, peaveys, cant hooks, pikes, log-marking irons, and the many specialized implements used in 19th- and early-20th-century timber operations.

On display:

Crosscut saws — from the small one-man saws to the great two-man felling saws (sometimes called "misery whips")
Axes — felling axes, broad axes, splitting axes, each shaped for a specific role
Peaveys and cant hooks — for rolling and maneuvering logs by hand
Branding irons — used to stamp ownership marks on logs floated downriver
Sled and skid equipment — for moving logs over snow
Early chainsaws — including some of the first portable saws used in the region

Room 8 — The Lumber Camp Kitchen

One of the museum's most evocative exhibits. A full-scale replica of a lumber camp kitchen — the room where the camp cook fed crews of 20 to 40 loggers, three full meals a day, during the winter timber-cutting season.

The kitchen includes:

A working-replica wood-burning cookstove (period-correct, not in active use)
The long plank tables where crews ate
Pots, pans, kettles, and tableware in the volumes a 30-man camp actually used
Period-correct pantry shelves stocked with the foods a logging camp actually kept (flour, beans, salt pork, dried apples, molasses)
The hand-pump water arrangement that supplied the kitchen

Lumber camps were remarkably substantial operations — feeding 30 hungry men in winter weather required serious provisioning, and the cook was often the most important person at the camp after the foreman. The audio narration tells the cook's story alongside the equipment.

Room 9 — The Lumber Camp Office

A replica of a small logging-camp office. This is where the camp foreman did the paperwork — wages, supply orders, log counts, contracts with the larger timber companies — and where the camp clerk (often called a "scaler") recorded the volume of timber cut.

The office includes:

A period desk and chair
Ledger books and account paper
A working oil lamp (not in active use)
Wall-mounted log-scale charts used to estimate board-feet from a log's diameter and length
A pot-belly stove for winter heat
Personal effects — letters, photographs, a small library of the kind a camp foreman would have kept

Why Logging?

Visitors sometimes ask why a maple museum dedicates an entire floor to logging. The answer is that in the Adirondack region — and in most maple-producing regions of the U.S. and Canada — the two industries were inseparable. The same families, the same forests, the same seasons of the year. Logging happened in the winter (when frozen ground allowed sleds and skids); sugaring happened in late winter and early spring (when the daytime thaws started the sap flow). A regional museum that ignored logging would tell only half the story.

The Audio Narration

The third floor's audio narration is some of the most story-driven in the museum. Logging-camp life was distinctive — isolated, all-male, physically demanding, and shaped by a culture and vocabulary all its own — and the narration draws heavily on oral histories from former loggers and camp cooks recorded in the 1970s and 1980s.

Photography

The lumber camp kitchen and office are particularly photogenic and are among the most-photographed exhibits in the museum. Non-flash photography is welcome.

Returning to the First Floor

From the third floor, the staircase returns directly to the first floor, where the gift shop and exit are. The whole circuit — start to finish, all nine rooms, with audio narration — is what most visitors describe as a two-hour tour. Gift shop info