For a thousand years, the loudest sound along the western shore of the Chesapeake had been the crack of summer thunder or the splash of a sturgeon breaching the tide.
Now, from dawn until dusk, the virgin forest echoed with the scream of six steam-powered circular sawmills.
To a people who felled trees by charring the bark with embers and chipping away the charcoal with stone celts, what the Iron Kingdom did to the woods was sorcery.
Work gangs of Irishmen and English sappers marched into the timberline with crosscut saws and steel wedges, dropping three-hundred-year-old oaks and towering pines like stalks of wheat.
Before the leaves had even stopped trembling on the fallen crowns, chains were hooked to the trunks, and forty-eight steam hoists dragged the logs down mud-slicked skids directly to the mill saws.
