The Saint Croix Boom Site and the Great Log Jams

A few miles north of downtown Stillwater, along the river highway, is a quiet wayside that was once the beating heart of the timber industry. This is the Saint Croix Boom Site, where a floating maze of chained logs, called a boom, stretched across the river to catch the harvest floating down from the north woods. The Saint Croix Boom Company was chartered in eighteen fifty one, and in eighteen fifty six a group led by Isaac Staples moved it to this spot, where it worked until nineteen fourteen.

Here, rugged men called boom rats sorted logs into rafts by reading the owners' marks stamped into the wood, a great many different marks in all. In the peak years, hundreds of millions of board feet of timber passed through in a single season. When too many logs arrived at once, the river choked.

The most famous jam came in the summer of eighteen eighty six, though it formed upstream in the rocky gorge near Taylors Falls, piling logs into a tangled wall miles long and dozens of feet high that took hundreds of men, and finally dynamite, weeks to break. Today the site is a National Historic Landmark, a peaceful overlook where you can imagine the roar of a river paved with pine.