Where did the beard fashion come from: what American woodcutters really looked like

At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries in North America, there were about 500 thousand lumberjacks. It was seasonal work, far from cities and relatives, but very responsible and dangerous. Lumberjacks worked by hand, their guns were a saw and an ax. They lived in tents, right in the forest, where there was a common kitchen, and felled trees, and then they were transported using mules or lowered along the river. Despite the fact that the work of a lumberjack was not particularly paid and, one might say, primitive, most men were proud of their occupation. This profession was associated with strength and masculinity. They worked with a hand saw and an ax. Not surprisingly, lumberjacks were often romanticized as very hardworking men with a capital letter. This image penetrated into world literature: we all remember the work "Country of OZ" or the more famous interpretation of Alexander Volkov's "The Wizard of the Emerald City" in Russia. Even this fact indicates how popular the lumberjack profession was.

American lumberjacks mainly had Scandinavian roots. Once their ancestors worked as lumberjacks in Europe, and they continued the tradition in forest-rich North America.

Even the modern fashion speaks of romantics in the past and such purely male work. Today, men adopted the style and features of a typical lumberjack (although he still looked a little different in the 19th century): they wear a beard, flannel shirts and adhere to a rude style in clothes. For them, they even coined the term - lambersexuals (in English lumberjack - lumberjack) as opposed to caring for themselves metrosexuals. So masculinity is back in fashion, so we decided to remember what the male lumberjacks looked like at the beginning of the last century.