When David Remington went back to the Red House sawmill at Allegany State Park five years ago, he said the walls radiated the personality of the building.
“You can feel these people in here,” he said in a YouTube video. “You can feel the sweat and the work.”
Take a look inside the restored Allegany State Park Red House sawmill near Salamanca.
Remington, who grew up in the park, once worked at the mill. His father put the steam-powered sawmill together in 1947 and ran it. It operated during the cooler months of the year because it would be too hot inside the mill during the summer.
While silent today, the mill, which was shuttered in 1997, will have a grand reopening for the public at 10 a.m. Saturday. From now on, it will be more of a museum than a noisy, steamy workplace.
Sitting behind a maintenance building off Allegany State Park Route 1 near Red House Lake, the sawmill will be open for tours from 10 a.m. to noon every Sunday from mid-May until Columbus Day weekend. Members of the Friends of Allegany State Park and the Allegany State Park Historical Society will lead them.
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The mill sat empty for nearly two decades before park officials in 2015 asked the Friends of Allegany State Park to undertake its renovation.
“When they asked us to do this, we were all excited,” said Paul Crawford, president of the Friends of Allegany.
They thought it would take a couple of years.
Paul Crawford, president of the Friends of Allegany State Park, said the volunteers with the nonprofit group worked nine years to help restore…
By then the grounds around the building were overgrown and porcupines had taken up residence inside, chewing on the wooden walls and getting under the joists. Before any volunteers could go in and work, the animals – and years of animal waste – had to be removed.
Most of the walls had to be removed and were replaced with $4,500 of Amish custom built lumber for historic authenticity.
Nine years later, the sawmill is ready to be another historic feature and interpretive destination inside the 65,000-acre park.
“It sat vacant for so long, and all the equipment was still intact. The bones were good. We put a new roof on it,” Crawford told The Buffalo News. “It will be a great new destination in the park.”
The restoration came with about $50,000 in grants from Parks & Trails New York, plus another $30,000 raised through raffles and thousands of volunteer hours.
Sawmills operated on creeks in Allegany before the park was formally established as a state park in 1921, and they continued.
“That was in the days when you took the sawmill to the woods. Now you take the wood to the sawmill,” Remington said.
The original mill was on Stoddard Creek, about a mile from the Red House campgrounds. Remington’s father, Robert, repaired a World War I era boiler for that mill. The boiler, now rusted and broken, and most of the equipment was moved to the Red House sawmill in 1947.
The sawmill building is covered in old corrugated steel, with wooden shutters on the windows.
A float pond outside the back of the structure is where the logs floated in dammed creek water to wash off the dirt before they were pulled onto a steam-driven chain conveyor up to the second story, where they landed on a sled, ready to be cut.
The diameter of the log determined how thick the boards would be. The lumber was sent to the loading dock at the front of the building, where it was hauled onto trucks or stacked outside to air dry.
Lumber came from downed trees in the park. It was used in cabins and even bartered for heavy equipment from Salamanca and for fish from a fish hatchery.
The mill process is detailed on several kiosks inside the building, alongside giant circular saws and equipment, some dating back more than a century.
Videos of Crawford’s interviews with some of the former mill workers, as well as someone walking through the process when it was in operation, will play on large TV screens.