Hi to Marie and the other Davis cousins and connections out there - does anyone know anything of the Henry and Irvine Davis mentioned in John's quote? regards Leith Davis -----Original Message----- From: John Raymond [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, 15 June 2000 4:14 To: [email protected] Cc: Leith Davis Subject: Re: Timber industry North Coast Leith Davis wrote: quoting re Bellinger red cedar trees from a NSW Forestry history book: > > "Mr E H F Swain, then a district forester and late Commissioner of > Forests, in a Bulletin issued in 1912 wrote "it is recorded of one > growing between Fernmount and Raleigh that 39,000 superficial feet > of timber were obtained by the saw and that another 5,000 > superficial feet twelve or so years later were axe chopped out of > the limbs by the succeeding settlers. Of another on what is now > Connell's farm, near Fernmount, it is recorded that a family named > Woods lived in the roofed over spurs for two years." The quote was of interest, as the farm selected in 1866 by an Irish born gg grandmother, joined the Connell farm below Fernmount. It may be of interest that the 44,000 sf tree mentioned in the quote was only a baby compared to the Macleay Valley one mention at p.82 in at Marie H. Neil's book - "Valley of the Macleay" (Wentworth Books, Sydney 1972). Re the Macleay tree the author wrote: "felled in 1882 on Henry Sauer's property on Nulla Nulla Creek by Henry Davis and three sons, George, Alfred and Daniel, of Uralgurra. To saw through this tree , which was forty-eight feet in girth ten feet from its base, it was necessary to weld two pit saws together. The flitches, one of which was displayed in the Paris Exhibition of 1855, were split off by dynamite. This mighty tree yielded 84,000 super feet of timber." - (cited source was a 1971 letter from Irvine H. Davis to the author M. Neil). However I guess in the wider world, as far as big trees go, even it was a baby. I read in a book "Lynn's Valley Tales and Others", kindly sent to me by a gentleman who helped out with some lookups in Kern County in California, of a Sequoia in the Greenhorn Mountains near Bakersfield which when first found by the author was broken off at about the same height as the surrounding pines, and which the author had in 1912 personally measured at 120 feet in circumference around the base. He mentioned it had been first measured with the same result of 120 feet by a party of three cattlemen in 1885. To get through that one might have taken a bit more than two pit saws joined together :-) John Brisbane GENEALOGY HOMEPAGE: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~jray