WOOD SUPPLY.
A Woodman’s Explanation of Why There is Not a Larger Supply This Winter on the H. & D. Road – The Railroad Company and Its Inspector Accused.
To the Editor of the Globe.
I notice in your weekly issue of November 25th that Mr. L. B. Hodges is reported as stating in the chamber of commerce at St. Paul that there was not a sufficient quantity of wood cut in the big woods to supply the treeless region. Perhaps this is so, but it may surprise Mr. Hodges and others of your numerous readers to learn that here in the town of Dahlgren, Carver county, there are hundreds of cords of wood lying rotting where it was piled in the woods, and within one or two miles at the outside, of the H. & D. railroad. Why? Because of the rascally system of extortion practiced in the measurement by the inspector. So long as this system is allowed to continue, so long will the people here object to haul wood for the company. In many cases men whose wood lands lie on the railroad prefer hauling their wood five or six miles to the brick yards of Carver or Chaska, where they receive no more nominally per cord, but where they do receive the measured value. One hauling and piling wood for the company is required to add six inches to the height of the pile – for shrinkage they call it – and in addition to this he is muleted from five to twenty-five per cent in the length measurement, as may suit the will of this autocrat of the wood-piler. If one may venture to expostulate with him, he is told that if he does not like it, he will take off his line. Neither is one allowed to know the result of the inspection until he is paid for his wood, and it is too late to enter any protest. It used to be said that the meanest man in any community was selected for poundmaster. It seems to be on some such principle that railroad wood inspectors are selected.
This one tells with great glee of a poor man who hauled ten cords of wood to the railroad on a handsled, and how he docked him 20 per cent to learn him to pile it, as he expresses it, “Just as I want it.” Now this, although it is bad enough, would not be so bad did the people of the treeless regions receive the benefit of this shave; but they do not. The most diligent enquiries elicit the fact that those people receive a very scanty cord of wood for their money; and that they receive the same satisfaction we do. “Take it or want it.” The St. Paul Dispatch, (I think it is) asserts that the railroad companies can furnish wood for two and a half dollars per cord and make money on it. Let us see. The H. & D. railroad paid here last winter for soft wood, which includes bass wood, elm, etc., one dollar and thirty-five cents, and sold it for four dollars, which is two dollars and sixty-five cents for the carrying alone. They paid for maple wood two dollars and a half per cord and sold it for six dollars, or three dollars and a half for the transportation.
You will see by this that there are good and sufficient reasons why Mr. Prior cannot obtain wood. When a man pays 80 cents per cord for chopping soft wood, besides swamping, hauling and piling, and after paying for the chopping of say one hundred cords, the inspector allows only eighty-five, and this without rhyme or reason, and at the rate of $1.35 per cord, while the company charges $2.65 cents for the carriage, I think, in view of all this, that it is very plain why the company cannot obtain wood.
We have plenty of wood here and will have for some years yet, but people cannot afford to chop and haul it and then give it away, or, if they do, they prefer to give it to the people direct and not to the Hastings & Dakota railroad company.
Dahlgren, Carver county, Dec. 6.
Source:
The Saint Paul Daily Globe
Thursday Morning, December 6, 1880
Volume III, Number 334, Page 2