"...A Symphony in Tin"

Photo of lumberjacks seated at three long tables in a log-structured cook shack with cooks standing in the background, 1900

Lumberjacks eating in lumber camp near Blackduck, 1900. 
Minnesota Historical Society Photograph Collection, Location No. HD5.7 r79

"...with 120 men setting down at a table and eating off tin plates and having tin cups, there's a kind of noise there that I don't know how to describe. I think you'd have to call it a symphony in tin. When you hear that rumbling, it's a sound similar to a beehive, but there'd still be the clank of the tin plates."

—Maggie Orr O'Neill

Maggie Orr O'Neill Oral History Interview, Oct. 1, 1955 (Mrs. O'Neill worked in a lumber camp in the 1880s.)