In 1879, Delaware illustrator and author Howard Pyle visited the shinglers of the Great Cypress Swamp and recorded the hard labor of excavating buried logs from the boggy soil, watching as a gang of workers sawed through a log, levered it from its oozy bed, and rolled it into the open air. Wooden shingles were once an important product of this ancient wetland on the Delaware-Maryland border, used to cover house roofs and outside walls, but shingling nearly died out after the once-vast forests were cut down for lumber, farming, and heat. Just before the Civil War, buried trees, mostly baldcypress and white cedar, were found beneath the swamp, where they had lain for many years after falling, and this hidden forest of logs revived the shingling trade despite the difficulty of digging them out. By 1910, however, cheaper redwood shingles from the West Coast undercut local makers, and efforts to compete led to the draining of the swamp, making the peat-rich soil dry enough to burn. In 1930, Delaware's worst fire burned for eight months and destroyed thousands of acres of trees and logs. After many years, the Great Cypress Swamp has been recovering, but the shinglers' way of life is gone forever.