[fintstone]

Originally Posted by stevej37

As a teen in the 60's my brother and I were nosing around in our G'pa's shed and noticed his 2 man crosscut saw used for felling large trees.
We took it out in the woods and tried to cut a tree down....tried. It was all work and exhausting to get halfway thru a med sized tree and we gave up.
My father said it was nothing to go out and cut trees all day long. How times have changed.

We did it all day when building fences. Pretty much daylight to dark. Fit it in between planting and harvest (and school).

We would find the closest tall black locust trees (to where we were building) and saw one down. Remove the limbs with an axe and use the saw to cut it into 8 ft sections. They were hundreds of pounds. Then, if we had a horse or mule at the time, rig it up and drag the log to where they were needed. Then do another. When we had enough for the job, we would start splitting them with wedges and a very large hammer.

If we had no horse/mule, then we split them on the spot and carried them to the field. I carried the wood that was not right for fencing to home or to where we could access with a pickup truck where possible... and it was sawed up with a similar saw into pieces that could be split for firewood.

I got a real summer job when I was 13 or 14 and was a lot less help...and added an afterschool job at 15...so was not able to help out nearly as much. The graduated and left home after turning 17. It must have been hard on my father. We raised our own food and harvested firewood for heating.

My father bought a secondhand chainsaw before I left home...but it was as hard to use as the crosscut for us as we really did not know what we were doing, it was very dull, and it was hard to keep it running (knew little or nothing about small engines). Yep...we were pretty poor and backwards. But, it sure made the rest of the world/life/work seem pretty easy.