GILMANTON, N.H. — On Bob Potter’s farm, the whine of a saw is heard over the grumbling of a diesel-powered engine as he and his boys carry on a family practice begun nearly half a century ago.

Moving back and forth through the blade on a motorized carriage, long poplar logs that the guys harvested off their Gilmanton farm are cut into planks that they’ll use this spring to build a new 30-foot-by-40-foot barn for some of their 85 head of beef cattle.

Carl Potter chips ice off poplar logs before they are cut at the family sawmill. The Potters started up the family mill to cut planks for a barn they plan to build later this spring.

Sawyer Bob Potter wrestles with a log to get it on the carriage at the family saw mill in Gilmanton, N.H. The small family mill, built by his father, has been on Potter’s 250-acre farm since the 1960s but is only used on occasion to cut lumber. Photos by The Associated Press

New Hampshire has deep connections to timber that go back to the 1600s when the state sent white pine trunks to England to make ships’ masts. Forests cover almost 85 percent of the state and the timber/forest industry pumps millions of dollars into the economy.

It’s not unusual to find homestead mills like Potter’s.

Potter’s father, also named Bob, started milling his own lumber in the late 1960s on the 250-acre farm, converting a massive heavy equipment motor to power his blades. It was a moneymaker for a while but when the economy turned sour in the 1980s, the younger Potter largely shut it down.

The family mostly uses the milled lumber for repair and construction projects on the farm that goes back eight generations to 1781. They’ll occasionally cut for outside jobs but keep the income flowing through an excavation and land-clearing business, the cattle and maple syrup. Potter and two of his three sons, 22-year-old Carl and 18-year-old Sam, worked on the sawmill this week because the sap hadn’t started running yet.

The saw will spin on but Potter won’t try to make a living off it.

“I love sawing lumber but if you can’t make any money at it, you have to go where the money is,” he said.

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