When did mature redwood trees become possible to harvest?
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Auguste Duhaut-Cilly visited Fort Ross in 1828. He made a famous drawing of the fort and wrote:
We went with Mr. Shelekhov to view his timber production.... Mr. Shelekhov showed me the trunk of one that had been felled recently; it was twenty feet in diameter measured two feet from the ground and from one burl or buttress to the other; the main trunk was more than thirteen feet in width. I measured two hundred and thirty feet from the stump to to the crown, lying where it had been parted from the bole.
Given its location and size this would have been a mature, if not record-setting, Coast Redwood. Apparently the Russians brought or made more advanced tooling for forestry than the Hispanic immigrants had done.
Likely employing the same source but without saying so, Coast Redwood: A Natural and Cultural History (Evarts and Popper, eds.), says "...Russian craftsmen felled trees up to 20 feet in diameter..."
Upvote:0
"Officially," the first known harvesting of redwood trees was after the start of the 1849 gold rush, when white men arrived in large numbers. It may have been "possible" to do this earlier, but we may never know because this was when implement was first put to tree. (There may have been some harvesting by Spanish or Russian settlers that was not recorded.)
Unofficially, the redwood may have been "harvested" by Native American tribes who had been in the region for about 1000 years. These people however, used fire to "fell" large trees, not the advanced methods you mentioned.
Upvote:10
Though there may have been logging smaller trees earlier, It appears that the first well documented felling of one of the giant trees may have been in 1853:
On Monday, 27 June, 1853, a giant sequoia – one of the natural world's most awe-inspiring sights - was brought to the ground by a band of gold-rush speculators in Calaveras county, California. It had taken the men three weeks to cut through the base of the 300ft-tall, 1,244-year-old tree, but finally it fell to the forest floor.
More can be read about these events here : Mother of the Forest
This artists view shows the felled 'Mammoth' tree in the foreground, while the scaffolding is seen in the background stripping the bark from the Mother of the Forest, which later is displayed in London
Another image from here shows more detail on the size of the tree which had been cut:
The wikipedia article mentions this tree is often called the 'Discovery Tree' for its species (even though it wasn't actually the first):
Much more publicity was given to the "discovery" by Augustus T. Dowd of the Calaveras Grove in 1852, and this is commonly cited as the species' discovery. The tree found by Dowd, christened the 'Discovery Tree', was felled in 1853.
So we discovered this Wonder in 1852, an killed it in 1853. :(
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