DeadHead logs share a rich history with Maine’s legendary logging industry. These historically significant logs sank during the log drives across Maine’s lakes and rivers beginning in the early 1600’s. By 1850, Bangor, Maine was the world’s largest lumber port, shipping over 250,000,000 board feet of lumber per year.

Lumbermen, originally logging softwood pines, worked their way north. By the early 1800s they had worked their way into the Hardwood Ridges of Maine’s mountain region. Since hardwoods could not be floated down river like pines, sawmills and plywood mills had to be set up on northern Maine lakes to receive the logs.

As the hardwood ridges were cut, the logs were brought lakeside by horse teams and then “rafted” (chained to buoyant spruce logs) and towed down the lakes to the mills for processing. Since the weather on these northern Maine lakes can change quickly and dramatically, many of these rafts were lost or cut loose during storms to become sunken treasure and re discovered hundreds of years later.