Sawmill Cove Traditional Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(regular)
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It's a new cache in an old spot: the historic site of Lucky Baldwin's Sawmill. Hard to imagine now, but this seemingly forgotten section of shoreline once bristled with industry.
Elias Jackson Baldwin, better known by the sobriquet "Lucky", acquired the Sawmill Cove area at Fallen Leaf Lake in 1878 as part of his 546-acre land patent, but it was his managers Lawrence & Comstock who built the mill. According to Ray Knisely, property manager for Anita Baldwin and the executor of her estate, "Mr. Baldwin spent a year in the east in activities in New York and all, and he had implicit trust in his associates (Lawrence & Comstock). He came back and they had built a sawmill and had logged a little piece of the easterly side of Fallen Leaf Lake. There was damn near a shooting scrape over it... Baldwin had a violent dislike for people who cut trees. He had seen the hardwood forests in Ohio and Indiana despoiled and he left an admonition in his will to his heirs against ever logging the whole Tallac property." A 1916 newspaper article suggests the mill was constructed around 1886. In 1885, about the time the newspaper accounts indicate the mill was built, Baldwin did in fact spend the summer in New York racing horses while waiting out a breach of promise suit filed by his paramour Louise Perkins. Further proof of Lawrence & Comstock's involvement comes from the claim they filed seeking reimbursement from Baldwin's estate for $87,947 for construction of the lumber mill.
Witnessing the logging and mill operation at Fallen Leaf Lake firsthand, George Wharton James wrote, "On the hills about the lake, the "fellers" may be found, chopping their way into the hearts of the forest monarchs of pine, fir and cedar, and then inserting the saw, whose biting teeth soon cut from rim to rim and cause the crashing downfall of trees that have stood for centuries." James went on to describe how the logs were dragged by horses to a greased chute made of logs laid side-by-side, shot into the lake and towed to the sawmill.
The mill itself was a marvelous structure, so beautifully designed and crafted with interlocking joints the Anita Baldwin's architect tried to persuade Anita to make it her personal residence, according to Ray Knisely. Instead she converted the mill into a boathouse with a ramped auto garage overhead and built her home on a view site nearby. The sawmill operated over a period of twenty or thirty years. Little if any of the lumber was sold commercially; it was used for the construction of buildings at the Tallac Hotel. Lucky Baldwin's estate settlement from 1910 contains a detailed inventory of the sawmill, including a five-foot circular saw, electric switchboard, 75HP Westinghouse motor, pulleys, belts, and flywheels. The last entry, "357 logs in the lake" gives an idea of the scale of the operation at the beginning of the century.
NOTE: Historical information taken from
Fallen Leaf: a lake and its people 1850-1950
by Janet Beales Kaidantzis. ©2011
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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