The History of Stump Pullers — Why America Built Giant Machines to Rip 30-Ton Trees From The Ground

Comments · 169

• DE

  @deepbludude4697 · 1 month ago

  I live in the Ozarks I have stumps still on my property massive ones that aint rotted yet. I can spend all day trying to get stumps out and I have chain saws, a small 28HP tractor, its ass busting work. I cant imagine how the settlers did it by hand using mattocks, axes, buck saws, dynamite and some jack asses. It truly boggles my mind. Those people were so resourceful and hard working.

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• EA

  @easyjdier · 1 month ago

  In early colonial days in Virginia, they simply cut down the trees and farmed around them until they rotted. A few centuries later people used dynamite to just blow the crap out them.<br>I&apos;ve grubbed out a few stumps. Hard dirty work. You have to basically dig them up enough to get to the roots holding them so you can cut or saw them somehow. It&apos;s complicated.<br>Nowadays they have stump grinders the just come up and obliterate the friggin&apos; stump, grinding it into chips and shavings. That is a badass machine!

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• SO

  @socalpat2000 · 4 months ago

  The most astonishing thing were those carts that magically rolled through the railroad tracks, and the machines with gears and pulleys turning without anything powering them, with the guys hand testing on the gears.

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• BI

  @BigWorm10-4 · 1 month ago

  I was trying to explain this to my nephew one day we was going through heading from Cincinnati to Columbus Ohio people can&apos;t realize how much magnitude or how much time and manpower it took to clear all that land

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• DO

  @donlowe7093 · 2 months ago

  We have one of those stump pullers in our local Vintage Machinery Club. Not too many old timers recall pulling stumps but there are a couple of us remember using 8 % stumping powder in 10 inches. by 1 1/2 inch. We used a heavy bar to make holes under the stump,and tamped the dynamite in with dirt to get the energy to lift the stump. A few years later we used 60% Geogel for energy source in siesmograph exploration.

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• MI

  @MitchEllis-u4o · 1 month ago

  Fascinating to consider the scope and breadth of the stumpy areas that had to be cleared and finally a machine steadily progressing toward the ultimate stumper the crawler dozer pushing up stumps at such a rate that would not have been imagined only years before. &nbsp;Learned a lot from this video that I had never thought about the shear scale of the problem that faced farmers

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• TH

  @ThomasBranaman · 3 months ago

  Great way to talk about our past

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• FR

  @FreDiamont · 2 weeks ago

  It is amazing how much the world has changed in such a short time.

• RI

  @rickstephens1130 · 4 months ago (edited)

  I wonder if any of those stump pullers are still exist anywhere? <br>I would love to get my hands on one of those things! I&apos;m pretty creative and I could find a use for it. I&apos;m a retired tree climber and logger of 45 plus years. And &nbsp;fruit trees and shrubs pruning expert. I used to have a great clientele base. I can find a lot of uses for a stump puller. Actually I just wanted to restore it to working condition and use it for kind of a mascot for the tree business. And display it on the side of the truck and on business cards. Along with other tooling items that are in use. Now someone is going to see this and use the idea themselves. Because it&apos;s a good idea.

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• GR

  @grottofrog2978 · 1 month ago

  My mom used to tell me stories of her and my grandmother riding 50 miles one way in an old truck to pick up dynamite for grandpa to blow stumps

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• BI

  @BigWorm10-4 · 1 month ago

  We do excavating for a living my dad used to talk about when they use Dynamite to blow out rock and stuff and you buy it at the hardware store

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• RO

  @robertsastro · 1 month ago

  Thank you for this video.