On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, Dan Becker wrote:

> It's also being done with old growth cypress out of rivers in the southeast,
> and heart pine as well.  Back in the good old days when trees were trees and
> men were men, the logging industry would simply float the logs downstream to
> the mills (think "rivers you could walk on").  Inevitably, some of the logs
> stuck in the "log jams" (derivational euphemism word of the day) would soak
> up enough water that they would sink.
>
> As George notes, it's an excellent preservative, and the rarity and
> subsequent value of these old growth logs has now reached the point that it
> has become economical to salvage them.

There's a famous old Michigan Supreme Court case about logs which washed
up on a riverbank and sat on some guy's land for a few decades.  When he
decided to get rid of them or salvage them, a lawsuit ensued, and the
court ruled that the logs still belonged to the lumber company.

This is usually cited as evidence of how much clout the lumber companies
had in Michigan back then.

Nowadays, I suspect if you left something on somebody else's land for as
little as 10 years, and made no effort to consult them about it, you might
have trouble getting it back.

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com