Over a radius of ten miles north and south of Rockwood during the bitterly cold winter nights of the years 1870 and 1871, the “Saw Filer” frightened men, women and children with his hideous rasping noise in imitation of the filing of a big saw, only infinitely louder and more terrifying. An explanation was never found for this phenomenon and only one man ever ventured an interpretation of the hair-raising event with some plausibility. He concluded that “the Saw Filer protrayed the lumbermen who would level the magnificent forests of oak, hemlock, and pine, and that generations of people…born and unborn…would never see the likes of them again”.
Could his explanation have been the truth? Was the earth crying out in protest against a future atrocity? For after all…many of the forests were leveled!!
(Courtesy of the Rockwood Area Historical & Genealogical Society)
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