logging

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Timber and the logging industry was the first real financial boon to the upper Big Sandy valley. Cutting the virgin timber began in earnest before the Civil War, but boomed in the 1870's. The Big Sandy Heritage Museum holds one of the larger antique tool displays in Eastern Kentucky. Among those tools are a set of tree calipers used to measure the diameter of uncut trees and lettering tools to stamp owners’ initials and/or brands into the ends of timber ready for shipment downriver.

In order to transport the logs they would bind them together and float them down river to saw mills in far away cities. By the decade of the 1870s the Big Sandy was a veritable log jam of timber rafts during high tides. Smaller streams such as Johns Creek, Elkhorn, and Shelby contained numerous splash dams which held the water until the time was right for floating the logs into Levisa River.

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