Leaving Only Footprints

Charlie Smith works for a very quiet logging operation.

He and two draft horses spend their days silently hauling logs out of the woods, disturbing the landscape as little as possible, just as it’s been done for hundreds of years.

Except for a distant tractor loading logs onto a truck and an equally distant chain saw, no machines disturb the tranquility of the woods.

The horses, Pat and Maude, are key to the operation.

“I don’t own a hair on ’em but I love ’em to death,” Smith, 64, says of his “girls,” two large French draft horses called Percherons, which are bred for heavy work.

And work doesn’t get much heavier than logging a hardwood forest, this one in the middle of Fayette County, Tenn. For more than a year, Smith and the rest of the Ferge Operators logging crew, run by Bailey Ferge Sr. and his nephew, Jeff, have logged a 1,400-acre tract near Williston (pop. 341).

The parcel is a mix of pines, open fields, and hardwood. The landowners wanted mature timber cut and taken out to be sold as lumber, with minimal damage to the land and younger trees. They picked the right men for the job.

“There’s no ruts and no trees being run down by equipment,” Jeff Ferge explains of his horse-logging operation. They hope to finish the work by Christmas: “It’s slow with these horses,” Smith says.

Most logging operations employ diesel-powered skidders that knock trees down and drag them out of the woods. During the process, many small trees are crushed, and the land is rutted. Not so with Ferge Operators, which always has used draft animals rather than machines. The process may take longer, but to some landowners, it’s well worth the effort.

John Jackson, the firm’s timber cutter, fells 25 to 30 trees per day. Using the 20-inch bar on his chain saw as a measure, Jackson drops only trees—poplar, oak, and gum—that are at least 18 inches in diameter. Then he saws the trunks into lengths of 8 feet 8 inches.

Smith—and as many as four other one-man, two-horse teams—enters the woods with Pat and Maude, who pull the wagon he rides alongside a fallen tree, where he unhitches the horses for the loading. Using Maude for the task, Smith explains that Pat did the loading work the last trip, so “she gets a break.”

After Maude drags the log into place next to the wagon, she is positioned on the opposite side to pull it up onto the rubber-tired vehicle on the command of “Go!” just as pretty as you please. They load up to six logs before the horses are rejoined to pull their cargo to the loading area, where logs are hoisted by tractor onto a truck.

“I like working with ’em,” logger Glenn Howard says as he drives his two 1,800-pound Percherons into the loading area at lunch. “You’ve got to make them work for you. They don’t mind. They’re ready to go on Monday morning.”

During a day’s work, the horses take only water. At the end of the day, back in their stables, they each get a five-gallon bucket of feed and “all the hay they can eat,” Howard says.

The Ferges purchase their horses, around $2,000 each, at about 18 months to 2 years old, training them by teaming a new horse with a seasoned veteran for two or three days of work.

“The demand (for horse logging) is increasing. We’re booked two years ahead,” Bailey Ferge says. He figures more “clear profit” is available from the horse operation than if he ran a machine timbering business; the horses require less upkeep and don’t depreciate every year. Nevertheless, Smith and the Ferges know the hot Southern days require extra vigilance; they rest the horses as needed.

“I came here … and liked it, so I stuck with it,” says Smith, a Covington, Tenn., resident who retired in 1993 from a Memphis-area manufacturing plant. He joined up with the Ferges in 1995.

As lunchtime comes to a close, a chain saw begins to hum in the distance. Pat and Maude’s harnesses clink pleasantly as they make their way back into the woods. It’s time to get back to work.

C. Richard Cotton writes from Saltillo, Miss.

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