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Yankee Loggers A recollection of woodsmen, cooks, river drivers Stewart Holbrook
Yankee Loggers A recollection of woodsmen, cooks, and river drivers by Stewart Holbrook
Soft Cover
Copyright 1961
123 pages
The older Connecticut Valley Lumber Company dominated the region of its title. The Berlin Mills, or Brown Company, ran things on Upper Androscoggin waters. On the turbulent Pemigewasset the Henry family had the major operation. There must have been twoscore smaller outfits. One and all they were dedicated to the letting of daylight into the swamp. *
No matter the imposing statistics of textiles and shoes, of milk and potatoes, and of granite and marble, the all-pervading influence in our region was the forest-products industry. In the winter riverbanks piled up with spruce. When the ice went out, the logs soon followed, with the drivers riding and chasing them to the waiting booms at the mills down-river. Even the brooks played parts in this great annual event, for scarcely a one of them but had from two to a dozen head dams ready to catch and hold the freshet briefly; then the sticks were sluiced from one to the other until they reached the main drive on the big rivers.
There were other signs to tell the stranger he was in logging country: four-horse tote teams moving day and night from the railheads to the depot camps; an unlikely large number of so-called hotels in small villages, the bars of which reputedly made small fortunes when periodically anywhere from fifty to five hundred and the thick all-wool pants that came from either Campton, New Hampshire, or Johnson, Vermont. All these things were evidence of the dominant industry.
The influence went further and deeper. Few of us boys wanted to be soldiers or cowboys or policemen. To be a riverman and go down with the drive was the stated or secret ambition of most of us. To ride a heaving log through white water, to steer a bateau down Fifteen-Mile Falls, to break a jam anywhere - these were the most important things one could hope to do. What we wanted, in that time and place, was a cant dog, a pair of new calked boots, and a fast-moving stream of logs.
For us logging camps had all the magic of the Land of Oz. (It was not until later that we came to appreciate the great ingenuity of the woodsmen who not only built the camps, but all their furniture and fittings, too.) Half-savage places remote from town, yet alive with shouts and the sound of bells and creaking runners, they seemed like stars in the vast forest night and mystery of spruce and fir and hemlock. The forest was dark enough, but never quiet for long. At night it snapped and crackled and boomed from bitter cold. By day it echoed from ax and saw, with only a momentary pause when a felling wedge went home and a big, tall spruce came swishing down to deep silence in the snow.
Half a century later I think of it as a good time and place to have been born and reared in. I realize, of course, that nostalgia is a tricky emotion; no matter how Webster defines it, it is basically a regret for our lost youth. Youth was a time when all the world was new, all of us were young and handsome, and everything was possible. Dreams came easy then and died hard, if at all. Some of my own dreams took form while I was employed variously by the Connecticut Valley Logging & Driving
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