Axes fly and trees fall at woodsmen’s showcase

BRADLEY – Leonard’s Mills’ 1790s sawmill and logging village came alive at the Woodsmen’s Day celebration on Saturday.

Teams from Colby College, Unity College and the University of Maine demonstrated a variety of competitive logging skills used at college and professional Woodsmen’s Day events around the world.

The skills included ax throwing, cross-cut sawing, underhand chopping, and a standing, or vertical, chop. They also felled a 60-foot evergreen tree and with the help of a Belgian draft horse, twitched, or dragged, it out of the woods.

During the events, families roamed the 400-acre property of small cabins, work buildings and nature trails along Blackman Stream. Volunteers in period dress performed tasks such as sawing, hewing and blacksmithing. Lemonade and bean-hole beans cooked overnight were available for sampling.

Margosia Jadkowski, a sophomore at Colby College and a Winterport native, explained that the woodsmen’s teams are made up of both men and women and the team on her campus dates back to the 1960s.

“It’s very much a sport, but it’s very much a culture, too. It attracts a different kind of person,” Jadkowski said, noting that the team brings together students from rural areas and students from cities.

Brothers Bob and Chuck Bills demonstrated their hewing skills with a variety of axes, which they used to transform a long, raw trunk of white pine into a clean, square beam. Nearby, Clum Spencer, a Maine balladeer and folklorist, led a group of 20 visitors in songs about logging, sawmills and landscape. He was the picture of a woodsmen with his handlebar moustache and checked work shirt.

Leonard’s Mills is a “living history site” of the Maine Forest and Logging Museum. Located on Government Road off Route 178, the museum is open daily year-round and hosts a number of events in the coming months.

For information on the museum go to www.leonardsmills.com.

aravana@bangordailynews.net

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