FWIW, in one local roof system from the early 1850's there are purlin plate and straining beam timbers around 20' long that were hewn on 2 adjacent faces and up and down sawn on the other 2 faces. In fact in these roof trusses, the only timbers not showing that were the 40' bottom chords which were hewn and the small section braces and common rafters which were completely sawn.

I can only guess they hewed them square first in order for them to fit on the sawmill -- the quarter sections were around 7 3/4" square, so they were hewing something like 16x16 timbers to resaw for this roof system. I can imagine that the saw may not have had much more capacity than 16". Any comment??

I agree with Tim that it is fairly easy to distinguish between up and down sawn and pit sawn.

Band technology didn't appear in this area until the mid 20th century. For some reason I thought it was only widely used in the really big Pacific northwest mills in the last decades of the 19th century.