To float felled timber to the rivers, the timber companies used wooden dams to back the creek waters up so the company could float them down to Escambia River. The wall of these dams were approximately ten feet high and were placed strategically according to the lay of the terrain. Out from the dams they built wooden chutes constructed by digging a deep ditch and then driving pilings into the ground and nailing up a wooden planked wall along the sides. These wooden walls were also used to straighten out sharp bends in the creek bed that could create future logjams. When the water behind the dams was suddenly released, the logs would float along rapidly with the surge while timbermen ran along both sides with poles.
The chutes were all hand dug although at times some of the crews used teams of mules that pulled scraping pans behind them that made the construction a little easier as well as faster. The standard ditch was around four to six feet wide and four to six feet deep. The felled logs that traversed these ditches ranged up to thirty foot long and were dragged to the chutes by a team of oxen for their downstream journey. Some say that the log ditches were pioneered by a local man by the name of William Wallace of which the community of Wallace was named. Some of his log chutes were up to thirty miles long as they snaked through the forests of northern Escambia County. At times there were at least two hundred logs dogged together with chains coming down the chutes to the mills at one time.
To get that many logs down the ditch the holding ponds had to be filled up and the dams released several times to get the amount of water needed to finish the job. Some of the loggers would actually ride the logs down the chutes to prevent log jams from holding up the operation. They used their spiked hook poles to manhandle the logs away from each other and keep them moving along smoothly. By the turn of the century the ditches were falling out of favor in lieu of small timber trains that ran along inexpensively laid tracks pulling rail cars full of logs south to the waiting sawmills. The work was hard and dirty, but paid good wages at a $1.00 a day’s. At times a local dentist by the name of Wilbur S. Hall hired out his oxen teams to pull the old logs out that were stuck in the bottom of the collections ponds and along the ditch. They were too heavy to pull out by hand and were too water logged to saw into smaller sections that could have been handled by the workers.
As indicated in the map below, both Beaver Creek Dam and Pine Barren Creek Dam had to be kept clean of all obstructions all the way down to Oak Grove Dam where the water would be backed up again for the next leg of the journey. At Oak Grove, the logs were floated to the Pine Barren sawmill just south of McDavid off present day Highway 29.
Building and maintaining the timber chutes c1910
Some of the timber canals can still be seen today
A timbermen's pike or pickaroon
An ox team moving logs to the creeks for transport
Big Wheel Carts and Oxen Teams c1900
Dragging the felled trees out