Wawa's Logging Heritage

Wawa's economy has long depended on abundant natural resources, including fur, fish, iron, gold, water, and trees, and the logs at the base of Scenic High Falls are remnants of an important logging past. Wood was first harvested along the Magpie and Michipicoten Rivers in 1900, when pulpwood and logs for railway ties were cut along the new Algoma Central Railway right of way between Michipicoten Harbour and the newly opened Helen Iron Mine. Farmers and labourers from Eastern Canada came to the Michipicoten area for winter work in remote logging camps, where trees were felled by hand, hauled by horse on icy winter roads, and piled onto frozen lakes. Dams were built on the outgoing streams to maintain high water levels, and during the spring thaw the wood drifted to the dams, which were opened in sequence to send the timber quickly down rocky riverbeds. Rivers sometimes jammed, and waterfalls became massive tangles of pulpwood that required many workers, ingenuity, and dynamite to clear. Thousands of eight- and four-foot pulp logs crashed over the seventy-foot chasm at Magpie High Falls, where the river's ninety-degree sweep was often blocked and the wood had to be pushed and pried loose before continuing downstream to the Michipicoten River. Where the Magpie joined the Michipicoten below Silver Falls at Michipicoten River Village, the logs were rafted for travel on Lake Superior. During spring log drives, workers known as Rodeo Hogs hopped across the floating logs near the river mouths, and the wood was bound into huge rafts surrounded by boom logs for towing along Lake Superior's eastern shoreline to the pulp mills in Sault Ste. Marie. During World War Two, German prisoners of war helped fill labor shortages in the logging operations on the Magpie and Michipicoten Rivers, and forestry still plays a role in Wawa's economy today.

Ontario · Canada