In the early days of interior commercial logging, passage by river was the sole means of moving timber from stump to sawmill. By the time Ruohomaa photographed a series of Maine log drives in the 1950s, logs were only driven on remote stretches of water where roads had not yet been built or improved for large trucks. By this time also, the St. Regis paper company (two of Ruohomaa’s logging shoots covered St. Regis drives) had acquired most of the productive forest along the Machias River in eastern Maine, totaling over 700,000 acres, and were the only entity driving logs on the waterway.

Heavy machinery was used during winter to harvest, haul, and stack wood next to lakes and rivers and to “water the logs”. However, once they were afloat, crews of river drivers had to shepherd them downstream using hand tools; the work required strength, intelligence, agility, and mettle. For a photographer, it was dynamic subject matter.