Historic remains of sawmills from the 1860s

I had a fellow email me the other day and ask the question about what would he look for to find the remains on an 1850s era sawmill located in the Sacramento valley This man is a serious historian with genuine credentials, so the mere fact that he is asking ME anything is quite a boost to my pride. As many of you know this blog is mostly about historical stories. A lot of the stories told here are shared as tidbits of information that could possibly lead to the true stories that seem to come out after some great discussion. But sailing ships, sawmills, and big machines has been one of my life long passions, so here's what I came up with.

As honored as I am that he asked me, I'm not sure how much help that I could be. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about it. He told me that he thought that he had found the flume that lead to mill, and he has a board known to be from the mill. He said that the board was made from a circular saw. He knows that the saw was a 48" diameter blade because he measured the saw-kerf.

I started thinking about what I would do if I were looking for 1850s sawmills. The only conclusion that I came to is that I would give up. However, I'm not sure that would be the answer that he was looking for. Many people succeed because they don't realize that their attempts are futile. I thought about what artifacts might be left behind. Hardly anything back in the 1850 had any iron in them. I assume that iron was rare and expensive in California back then. All the Iron had to be shipped into San Francisco, then blacksmithed into whatever parts that were needed. I assumed the sawmill of the 1850s were mostly made of wood. Wood was free and plentiful. The Drive belts would have been made from leather bands. The pulleys were most likely made out of wood. Any iron shafting would have been more valuable than gold, so any remains would have certainly have been salvaged, The saw blade would have also been expensive and highly salvageable.

The only possibility of remains, that I could think of, would have been iron nails. If the mill had burned there would have been some nails left in the ashes. Even then I can remember my grandfather sifting through the ashes of a house that had burned to collect the nails, so I'm sure that any remains of an 1850s era structure would have been picked through very thoroughly for Iron, no matter how the mill ended.

Then as a "Bullshistorian" I put myself back in the 1850s and became a sawmill. I am a fine sawmill. Back in the 1950s (when I was a kid) you were considered to be a darn smart man if you could make a success out of running a sawmill. So if I were a sawmill with a darn smart man running me, where would I be found in 2012? I have the brilliant advantage of being able to see what I'm headed into, because if I can be a sawmill, then I can also have the power to ask the people of the future where I'm going to end up. Okay, Enough silliness, but we do know what the mill had to go through getting to 2012.

The first thing that the mill would have to go through would have been salvagers. There would be no metal at all. I thought of the shafting, saw blades, nails, I even thought about the old poured babbit bearing caps that the must have used. they would all had been salvaged. So, I was left with rock structures, ditches and excavations. The mill would have been built on a flat large enough to hold logs and the lumber production, there would have been a road away from it. There would have been a need for power. Back then everything would have been mule power or water-wheel driven. The flume that this historian talked about was maybe for power or maybe ti transport logs too the mill. Some plumes were used for both power and log transport. The historian says that he can possibly identify the plume. The mill would have definitely been located near the river... no doubt in my mind.

If I were a mill by the river, I would have certainly been washed completely away by the huge flood of 1862, called the "Noachian Deluge" . It was by far the greatest flood that the western United States has ever known. I really don't think that any viable remains of sawmill could possibly be left. We have also had numerous floods since then that would have further cleared out any remains.

If I were a mill on high ground (I doubt that to be the case) I would leave rust, ashes, excavations, rock structures and absolutely nothing of any intrinsic value.

I'm kinda looking for comment about what I might have forgotten. Most of the early mills that I know of from the early days of California were frame saws, with a man on top and a man on the bottom The saw was lifted by the man on top, then when the saw was pulled down it made the cut.

I'm kinda also hoping that "Oregon" might know how saws were made back then. Insert bits?

Anybody have any ideas how we might help a REAL historian find his mill???