A few miles outside the park on the Hudson River, and a few miles upstream from Glens Falls, vestiges of the bolts and chains that once held the Big Boom together can still be found around the rocks in the river bed. First used in 1849, the Big Boom was a dam made of floating logs chained together, which held logs being driven out of the woods and down the river. Held here they could be sorted (logs were stamped with marks identifying the owner), and meted out to the mills at Glens Falls. During the peak year for log drives on the Hudson, in 1872, 18 logging companies sent two million logs downstream to the Big Boom. The last log drive on the Hudson, and the last of the drives in the park, was in 1950. By then, as now, logs culled from the privately owned forest land in the park are shipped by roads and trucks.
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