National Railsplitter Festival Saturday competitions include Team Rail Split

[September 21, 2021]    On Saturday at the National Railsplitter Festival there were a number of competitions going on throughout the day, all reflective of what life would have been like in the 1800’s and the era of Abraham Lincoln.

In the 1800’s fencing was done in a few different ways, but one popular in this part of the country was a split rail fence. These fences were built by taking whole logs and splitting them into multiple sections. The sections where then stacked in a specific manner to form a fence that would serve to mark land boundaries and keep livestock from wondering away from the farm.

prior to becoming a politician and over time winning the election to be the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln himself split many a rail during his time in central Illinois.

On Saturday one such rail splitting event was held on the back lawn of the Postville Courthouse. The team split was made up of two people to a team. Only one could work on the project at a time. While one worked, the other watched until it was time to hand off the tools to the second member. The process repeated again and again until the log was successfully split into eight rails.

Seven teams participated in the team split. Before the competition began, the teams drew numbers for the log they would be working on.

Team one was made up of Lawrence Dubbelde of Mackinaw and Chris Friedlein of Gibson City.



Team two was Curtis Prochnous of Downs and Zack Darnell of Bloomington.



Team three was the father and son team, Casey and Ryan Ballenger of Atlanta.



Team four was Cody Friedlein of Downs and Evan Coombs of Bloomington.

Team five was Bryce Muir of Lexington and Jon Norin of LeRoy.

Team six was a local pair from Lincoln, Jackson Johnson and Ethan Bertram.



Also from Lincoln was team seven, Thomas Madigan and Casey Barger.

The event moved along quickly because it was a timed event. Each team worked franticly to be the first to finish. In this competition that distinction went to the team of Chris Friedlein and Lawrence Dubbelde with a time of 12 minutes and 45 seconds.

Second place went to the team of Bryce Muir and Jon Norin at 15:33 and the Ballengers came in third with a time of 17:38.

Bob Rankin was the announcer for this competition. At the start he noted that this year the logs supplied by Baker Tree Service and All About Trees of Lincoln were ash. He said that the competition has not in the past included ash logs so there would be some uncertainty as to how the logs would split.

He also noted that every log would be different and the ease of splitting would be based on the luck of the draw.

As the competition went on, it was clear that some of the teams had tougher trees than others. The teams with logs six and seven were plagued with problems and unable to finish in the top five for the day.

The fourth and fifth place finishers also struggled with their logs and had finish times in excess of 20 minutes.

Around the field of logs and splitters a large crowd was watched the competition and cheered on their favorites.

At the end of the day everyone was pleased with the show and the showmanship of the teams.

[Nila Smith]