In Washburn’s early days, the waterfront was filled with sawmills, and the A.A. Bigelow Mill, which operated from 1887 to 1902 and later became the Hines Mill, was the largest of the town’s three major sawmills. It stood on pilings extending directly out from the present 6th Avenue West, and logs were hauled there by the mill-owned Washburn & Northwestern Railroad, a narrow gauge system. Once the logs reached the lake, they were fed into mill ponds at log dumps. To handle the massive amount of timber coming from the Bayfield Peninsula, a trestle was built 1500 feet into the bay just east of the main Bigelow-Hines mill dock, leaving shore about where the site is now. Little of the trestle remains today beyond a few broken pilings and some crib rock, but along its path lie hardware from the logging cars, including hand tools, tie-down chain, and parts of the cars and coupling systems, left where they fell on the final day of work.