During the Great Depression, loggers worked nonstop cutting timber for railroads, mines, and ranches. One of the longest-standing logging communities was a place called Apex along the Grand Canyon Railway, north of Williams and near the Canyon’s South Rim.
The Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company set up headquarters and a camp there in 1928. Now, Northern Arizona University students in historical archaeology are reconstructing the lives of the people who worked there.
For eight years, until 1936, Scandinavian sawyers cut trees, while Hispanic and Indigenous workers labored at the nearby railroad siding. People escaping the Dust Bowl in the Midwest also came.
At Apex, families lived in small houses; single men shared a bunkhouse. These were the original “mobile homes,” literally picked up and moved up the railway to the work site. A boxcar became a one-room schoolhouse, and a company store sold basic goods.
Loggers made 35 to 65 cents an hour, depending on the job. One dollar and five cents were deducted daily for housing. They had all the food they could eat to sustain them for 10 hard hours of work each day.
NAU’s Apex Archaeology Project, collaborating with the Kaibab National Forest and with funding from the Arizona Humanities Council, offers public tours and also holds a summer field school where students map and record features, including glass bottles, tin cans, and other objects scattered on the ground. Instead of collecting and removing them, everything is left in place in what’s called “catch and release” archaeology.
For information on public tours, contact Emily.Dale@nau.edu.
This Earth Note was written by Rose Houk and produced by KNAU and the Sustainable Communities Program at Northern Arizona University.
