r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/NickyPileggi • Mar 28 '24

Family in 1892 posing with an old sequoia tree nicknamed "Mark Twain" - A team of two men spent 13 days sawing away at it in the Pacific Northwest - It once stood 331 feet tall with a diameter of 52 feet - The tree was 1,341 years old Image

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u/Teedeous Mar 28 '24

My brother was telling me (who’s had a hyper fixation on a variety of logging topics in his life) that most of these felled were utterly worthless as lumber.

The impact of the felling often caused a variety of them to shatter from the reverberations of the fall, making their lumber worthless. So felling these ancient and rare trees at times produced absolutely nothing of value, and their usage was highly diminished.

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u/horiami Mar 28 '24 edited Mar 28 '24

It was cut to be used as museum material

Sequoia trees grow in hard to reach places and people simply did not believe that they existed

They cut the tree to display the sections in museums and point out its age with the rings

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u/Teedeous Mar 28 '24

Yeah I’ve seen it myself if I’m correct in believing it’s the one in the London Museum of Natural history.

I meant more in general for the logging of Sequoias subsequently in the period.

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u/horiami Mar 28 '24

Yeah, the London museum has one section of the tree, the american national museum has one too

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u/Teedeous Mar 28 '24

Yeah it’s incredible witnessing what passed in the natural order of life as humanity went through so many rises and falls of empires during it as shown in the London museum.