Judge William McCluer's Residence, SW Corner of North Third and Mulberry Street. Before he became a judge, McCluer, an attorney, was mayor of Stillwater in 1876.
Logs were shipped by rail from northern Minnesota to Stillwater and made into rafts. They were then floated down the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers. The rafts usually consisted of 8 to 10 strings of logs fastened side by side, each string measuring 16 across and about 400 feet long. Some of these enormous rafts stretched 4 or 5 acres in size.
Lumber was rafted downstream from Stillwater. Boards were arranged in cribs or heavy crates, each 16 feet wide and 32 feet long. A lumber raft might contain as many as 200 cribs.
At the boom, floating timbers chained between piers caught and contained logs for sorting and measuring and rigging into rafts. At one time, the Stillwater boom extended a distance of 9 miles and employed 400 men to sort, scale and raft timber.
Exterior view of the Isaac Staples Sawmill Building at 400 Main Street North in Stillwater, Minnesota. The building is also known as the St. Croix Lumber Mills- Stillwater Manufacturing Company and is on the National Register of Historic Places. This mill was built in 1853 by Seth Sawyer and Alvah Heaton. It was purchased in 1869 by Isaac Staples. He was a powerful lumber baron in the St. Croix River Valley during the logging boom of the late nineteenth century. Staples arrived in Stillwater, from Maine in 1853 as a representative of eastern investors. Hersey, Staples, andCompany became the largest single owners of timberland in the St. Croix valley. Aside from his massive holdings and operations in timber, sawmills, and the St. Croix Boom Company, Staples was also the region's most successful farmer and an important banker.