Greetings! My name is Ike Anderson, really Isaac, but no one calls me that. I was born at Forest Lake, Minnesota in 1891 and came to Camden Place as a child of two. My dad was a millwright, and when I was 15, Lumber Larson, a foreman for C.A. Smith Sawmill, hired me to carry water to the loggers. A yoke over my shoulders held two jugs as I walked over the floating logs to give the men a drink. I also carried little 5-cent waxed packets of snuff to sell them. When one of the loggers wanted me to try some, I declined because I saw the cat trying to bury some. That kind of destroyed my confidence in the product!
Later, I was promoted to “catch-marker.” That is a person who marks the logs with a mill’s mark. Each mill has its own individual mark to identify which logs are theirs. You take this sharp knife-like instrument and as the logs pass your station, you make four quick chops on the log, and it is done. It’s sort of like branding cattle.
In the winter the loggers went north with their “turkey sacks,” which were bags for their gear, to cut trees, mark them, slide or haul them to streams, and float them in great numbers down river to the sawmills. The loggers lived in large covered raft-like boats called Wannigans. These house-boats would follow the logs down the river to keep them moving to the “Boom House.”
This was on about 57th Ave. at the river. There the logs piled up until sorted into each mill’s boom, leading to the sawmill, before being cut into lumber. Booms were long poles chained together and anchored to make a channel (called a sorting gap) for each of the mills. C.A. Smith on 44th was the largest in the world at one time. Others were Bovey De Laittre at 40th, Backus-Brooks (Northland Pine) at 32nd, Akeley at 28th and across the river was Carpenter-Lamb. The Boom House was a large barracks-type building with the best cook and a place for the men to sleep upstairs. That was all good work and quite challenging, but you had to be steady and careful not to end up in the drink, which of course, never happened!
Now, to go on, I am going to relate some of my early memories of the past of happenings around Minneapolis. I remember Paul Johnson, Camden’s “meat man” coming out as a little kid, selling meat to the men in the Wannigans. He was employed by the Lidman Dairy and had dropped out of school around the 5th grade. I remember the workhouse farm and brickyards, the stagecoach to Champlin and the cranberries and thorn apples that grew by the creek from Humboldt to Washington. The first bike path, about 1900, was rolled cinders from 44th and Lyndale to Plymouth Ave., along Washington and 2nd St. The license was $1 a year and people were fined when they were caught without one.
I learned about sewing leather from Clause Lohse when I was about 12. Then I worked for John Amaldy on Broadway making harnesses and also for the English Government making saddles, like for the U.S. Army. Through the years I made some harnesses for the Minneapolis Fire Dept., Chicago Bakery, Mpls. Brewery, Glenwood-Inglewood, Ewald, Clover Leaf Dairy, Witts, logging camps, sawmills and others. The horse I rode all over Camden when I was young was “Pete.” At 42nd and Fremont was the stable for harness racing horses that I used to race with a sully at the State Fair. Oh yes, it’s a lot of fun to think back on all those good things!
Note: Taken from the booklet Floyd B. Olson Jr. High School and the history of Camden.