Logs End flooring is more than just beautiful – it’s soaked in history. We pay tribute to the early loggers with artifacts, hammer stamps, photo’s, stamped log ends and historical records in our showroom, and hope to one day establish a logging heritage museum where we can share our past and present with visitors from around the world.

Until then, we present this short history of logging on the Ottawa River.

Harvesting (early 1800s-1990)

The logs we salvage today were harvested throughout the 19th century, by people in the employ of pioneering lumber barons like Philemon Wright.

Philemon Wright first logged the Ottawa Valley in the early 1800s. He was the first to float a raft of timbers from Ottawa to Québec City. The voyage took two months to complete and signaled a turning point in the exploitation of the Ottawa Valley’s timberlands

The square timber trade was the first to employ the lumberjacks in the Ottawa Valley and officially began around 1830. The tall red and white pines would be cut down by hand using axes and crosscut saws. Then, after the trees were de-limbed and scribed, timber squarers would “square up” the logs using broad axes. The squared “sticks,” as they were often referred to, would then be dragged out of the bush by horses, oxen, and later by trucks and railroad to the river’s edge.

From here, the squared timbers were loaded on top of saw log cribs and fastened down. Hundreds of these cribs would be bound together to form giant wood rafts measuring thousands of feet long. Like Philemon Wright’s first timber raft, all subsequent rafts were floated down the Ottawa River to Québec City. The squared timbers were then loaded onto tall ships, where they were sailed to England, and cut into dimensional lumber.

This massive trade, which quickly became Canada’s largest export product, lasted into the beginning of the 20th century.

At the turn of the century, the square timber trade was replaced by the saw log trade. Now, the hard working lumberjacks and shantymen in the bush cut the trees down by hand or with primitive chainsaws. Millions of logs were dumped by into the rivers and floated down to their owner’s sawmills.

In the late 1880s, the Improvement Company of Ottawa (ICO) was commissioned by the federal government to control the transportation of the saw logs during the annual log drives. A fleet of boats, designed to tow large log booms, scavenge for stray logs, and ferry ICO log drivers up and down the Ottawa, were put into operation.

These practices were followed until 1990, when the log drive on the mighty Ottawa River was finally halted.

It’s estimated that over 14 billion logs floated down the Ottawa River over the course of the log drive era. Between 2-5% of the logs were lost each year to the bottom of the river and its tributaries.

Salvaging (1997-present)

In 1997, Logs End entered the picture. With the use of historical logging maps and precise underwater sonar equipment, we began locating large collections of lost timbers.

Once they are located, our scuba team ropes each log individually, raises it carefully, and extracts it from the river – continuing a journey that may have begun over 200 years ago.