In the spring of 1880, a log jam of almost unimaginable scale formed on the Chippewa River near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, stretching 7 miles from bank to bank and lasting 6 weeks before it finally broke apart. Contemporary reports described a river transformed into a solid mass of tangled logs, so densely packed that a person could reportedly walk from shore to shore without ever once touching water. By some estimates, more than 200 million board feet of timber had piled up in the jam, making it the largest ever recorded on Earth at the time. The disaster grew out of the booming 19th-century lumber industry, which relied on floating felled trees downriver to sawmills, a system that occasionally produced jams when water levels dropped and logs became wedged together. This particular jam remains a Guinness World Records title today, one many experts believe will never be broken again.
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