I did a quick search but there seem to be no pics,
though I'm not surprised. The sawmill adjoined to
the paper mill where I worked summers while going
to school, was built to handle old growth BC logs.
Before it was rebuilt a bit smaller, it was the place
where logs too big for any other mill got sent.
The main saw was a bandsaw, with a blade about 16"
wide, and a little under 1/4" thick. Sort of like
this one, but much much longer, with teeth on one side
only. It ran on a pair of wheels, one in the basement,
the other on the top floor about four storeys above.
The top floor was the saw sharpening floor, where the
blade not in use meandered in loops all over the open
floor, maybe 40x65ft room, with the wheel in the middle.
The blade lay on its edge, teeth up, and a guy with a
grinder spent all his work days grinding it sharp,
and as soon as he was done, it was mounted to replace
the other, and then he started over.
Occasionally the blade would hit something in a log.
On rare occasions this resulted in the blade breaking,
in which case the free end would hurtle down into the
basement and strike the floor, and shatter into shards
of shrapnel. Some smaller broken pieces got collected
and spirited off the sire by employees, who would make
knives from the shards; at least, that is the story I
was told of the origin of one beastly great clearly
homemade knife in someone's home.
The place was dark dingy oily and wadded with old sawdust,
made of immense fir posts, it had been built in 1912, and
looked like the archetypal workplace from the industrial
revolution. Its replacement was all metal, with lots of
windows, brightly painted in green and white, with the
latest in 1960s automation.