Five of the photos document two separate monster pile-ups which jammed the St. Croix River near Taylor Falls, Minnesota, in June of 1886 and August of 1889. The 1886 event was described by one reporter as "the jamnedest jam" he'd ever seen and the clean-up effort took hundreds of men six weeks to clear it, eventually requiring steamboats and dynamite. The jam became a major tourist attraction, with thousands of spectators visiting daily. While the 1889 one did not take as long to clear it was still a whopper of a jam, containing sixty-million feet of logs. These dual occurrences and other similar, albeit less jamned jams, were a main driving force behind the creation of the Nevers Dam.

The last two photos are winter scenes of commercial lumbering.

The photographs were taken by the Minnesota-based commercial photographer S.C. Sargeant and each photograph has a manuscript caption on the verso.