New York’s Largest Chainsaw Collection: Hud-son Chainsaw Museum

An early morning fog rolls through the town of Barneveld just outside the Adirondacks in New York as a worker flips on the showroom lights at Hud-Son Forest Equipment. As sales start amidst the smell of gasoline and chainsaws rev to life as employees set to work on customer repairs, the history of the tools of the forestry trade hangs in the front window. These tools, some over 90 years old, represent central New York’s Chainsaw Museum, a testament to passion and a long family history in forestry that runs in Dan Hudon Jr.’s family.

The late Dan Hudon Sr. grew up logging with his father Oscar and three brothers in northern New York between the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains. After ferrying troops in the Merchant Marines during World War II, Senior eventually settled his family in Barneveld, buying a car showroom in 1965 and starting a business selling chainsaws.

Over the years customers came into Senior’s shop, their chainsaws worn from hard work, and occasionally, instead of repairing them, he would take them in trade toward a new saw. Some were cannibalized for parts but others were added to a growing collection. More came in as donations with donors’ names still on tags attached to their handles. Some were simple but rare, like a Ford chainsaw—an option on the ‘70s “Camper Special” pickups. Others were commercial failures or oddballs, often quickly replaced by industrialized equipment and equally coveted.

In 2012 Dan Hudon Jr. fulfilled a dream of his father’s: creating a museum for these working artifacts in the company’s showroom, now called Hud-Son Forest Equipment. Hudon Sr. knew from decades of conversations with customers and collectors that there was a deep passion for these old saws. They speak to the history of this region and the hard work that built so many small towns in the mountains. From hundreds of chainsaws the father and son picked the rarest, most unusual, or most iconic, displaying them in the front windows and hanging dozens, carefully, 20 feet up in the rafters.

With Senior’s passing in March 2021, information about the lineage of some tools was lost. But his son says that their history comes to life in the eyes of museum visitors who reminisce about their own lives working alongside friends and family in the solitude of the deep woods.