Friday, August 26, 2022

Logging Bunkhouses as Seasonal Producting Living Quarters in the northern Midwest: now for seasonal farm workers!!

  Itasca County Minnesota zoning ordinance defined a Bunkhouse as:

Bunkhouse - residential accessory structure as sleeping quarters with no sanitation or cooking facilities or water under pressure.

Logging Bunkhouses were occupied in the winter since the roads were frozen hard

The County Shoreland Ordinance is silent on bunkhouses Hilarious.

 

https://www.mnhs.org/sites/default/files/forestsfieldsfalls/lumbering/lumbering-slide17.html 

 "The bunkhouse shanty wasn't the cleanest place in the world…. In camp you made your own bed of marsh hay or balsam boughs, covered with blankets. Now and then you'd add some more boughs, and when the lice got awful itchy, you had to take the better part of Sunday to boil the blankets…. No lumberjack ever took a bath. There wasn't any place to take one, and besides, we didn't believe it very healthy to take a bath very often. A man might get pneumonia taking baths in the wintertime. Somehow you never got dirty. But you'd take your clothes and boil them every 3 or 4 weeks or something like that."

Wow!

 The sleeping camp had bunks, one over the other, filled with straw; the deacon seat was built along the foot. there was a long stove in the center which was fired with four foot wood, mostly birch. Over the stove was a sky light which lifted up so as to freshen the air. The men nearest the stove got too warm during the night and opened the sky light. Then the men in the corners, or farthest away, got cold; so they got up and closed the sky light. This went on all night sometimes."

 I can relate to this for sure!!

Photograph of a small congregation of lumberjacks assembled inside a bunkhouse to hear sky pilot Frank Higgins preach c.1910.

 I don't envy this "rape of the forests."

Farm-related
BUNKHOUSE for temporary

Seasonal residence

ADD: ITEM 16 Farm-related

Bunkhouse

 only now they want "sewage treatment" - unlike the lumberjacks of lore....

 proof the condition continues!! Seasonal production occupancy living quarters! 

 Bunkhouse Any structure incidental to the primary dwelling which accessory use is for overnight sleeping accommodations on a transient basis only and which structure is not accommodated with running water or other indoor plumbing or bathroom facilities. (Amended 9-1-2020)

 

 http://www.co.wadena.mn.us/DocumentCenter/View/235/Zoning-Ordinance-PDF?bidId=

 

 there you go!! That's in Wisconsin.

Bunkhouses and Line Camp Cabins 

Temporary shelters are also placed strategically at great distances from the home ranch and in the privately owned fields enclosed in BLM or Forest Service grazing lands. These are the line camps, buckaroo camps, or cow camps where men stay for short periods of time while tending cattle through the government grazing allotments "on the mountain."


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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