Dangerous Drives

          New England was built of and by its forests, with towns and cities rising along with many fortunes. Right from the start, Europeans were awed by the seemingly limitless trees, something they’d not seen for a thousand years back home, and they wasted no time in cutting them down. In 1609, during his first voyage to the New World, Henry Hudson felled one on the Maine coast to replace a mast, and the Pilgrim’s second ship, the Fortune, was laden with pine clapboards on its return voyage to lumber-starved England (alas, a French warship interceded and took the cargo). New England lumber was traded for molasses and sugar in the West Indies, it was burned to make potash for the English glass and textile industries, and the biggest and best pines were marked as masts for the exclusive use of His Majesty’s navy.

By the time of the Industrial Revolution, substantial forests were long gone from most of the region’s settled areas, and the young country looked north to satisfy its unquenchable need for wood. Loggers headed into Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont along the paths of least resistance:  rivers like the Connecticut, the Androscoggin, the Allagash, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot. And what brought the men into the forests would carry the fruits of their labors out. Thus was born the New England log drive.

On the face of it, it all makes sense: cut trees in the winter, skid or sled the logs over slippery snow to the banks of brooks and rivers or out onto frozen lakes, and let the gushing spring thaw float them downstream to the mills to be made into lumber and paper. In practice, however, it was an audacious undertaking and brutally difficult work.

Set up deep in the forest, logging camps were rough places, full of rough men sleeping on hard bunks, their sodden woolen garments either breeding lice or steaming dry by the stove. They came from all over, as the “Do Not Spit on the Floor” sign on display at the Northern Forest Heritage Park museum in Berlin, New Hampshire, attests with its translations in French, Danish, Polish, and Italian. The cook was crucial, providing up to five meals a day, almost always the same thing: “baked beans, sourdough biscuits, spuds, salted meat, doughnuts, and tea, black and strong enough to float a peavey,” as one woodsman recollects in Dynamite, Whiskey and Wood, a film about Connecticut River log drives.

A peavey is a metal-spiked log-handling tool invented in 1857 by Maine blacksmith Joseph Peavey, still manufactured in Maine to this day, and indispensible when wrestling logs from forest to river. Up to 40 feet in length, they were muscled onto horse-drawn sleds, which would travel along roads hacked through the backcountry and kept iced by a sprinkler wagon that would water them every night. Piled high in lots near the riverbank or simply offloaded on the lake ice, spruce, fir, birch, and maple logs sat in the snow, waiting for the thaw.

In 1850, more than 8,600 men and 6,700 animals were working in the Maine woods alone. They too waited for the thaw, though for the men there was a short, rowdy, and dangerous time before “ice-out” arrived. This was a period “when the saloons were pretty full and the fights were pretty fierce,” as historian Bill Gove recounts in Dynamite, Whiskey and Wood. “During their time off between the logging season and the driving season, they had some ripsnorters.”

But when the spring finally came, a different kind of ripsnorter awaited. Depending on the route, up to a quarter-million logs lay ready to come down the streams, across the lakes, and down the main rivers, and moving them was a combination of hydraulic engineering, brute force, and the often deadly interaction of man and mass.

The challenges started at the streams, where hundreds of “squirt” dams were built to amass enough water to sluice the logs along. Lakes presented a different problem. With no real current to move them, logs had to be corralled by floating booms and pulled across great expanses. Before the advent of steamboats, crews would drop an anchor in the middle of a lake, attach the boom to a raft with a huge capstan and, through pure muscle power, walk around it for hours to tug the floating mass towards the anchor. They’d repeat the process until the logs made it to the end of the often-sizeable lake--Lake Chesuncook on the west branch of the Penobscot River was 18 miles long--and the head of the next stream. Getting to the main rivers was the beginning of a whole new problem: log jams. With tens of thousands of logs on the move, one snag could have disastrous consequences, as millions of pounds of wood built up in front of millions of pounds of water. Before they started using dynamite for the task, woe unto the river drivers sent in to find and dislodge the “key log,” which would unleash a roaring cavalcade. Ten to twelve men died this way every year on the Connecticut River, and George Van Dyke, the notorious owner of the Connecticut Valley Lumber Company, earned the enmity of all drivers for having yelled, as a log jam broke and workers fell into the maelstrom, “Never mind the men, save the peaveys!”

Environmental lawsuits and changes in papermaking technology lead to the end—the last New England log drive was down the Kennebec in 1976. The traces of this once-huge industry are sparse—peavey points, boom chains, dam cribs here and there underwater. Much more exists in our homes and public spaces, places celebrated by Walt Whitman in his 1856 poem Song of the Broad-Axe:

The axe leaps!

The solid forest gives fluid utterances;

They tumble forth, they rise and form,

Hut, tent, landing, survey,

Flail, plough, pick, crowbar, spade, 190

Shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, jamb, lath, panel, gable,

Citadel, ceiling, saloon, academy, organ, exhibition-house, library,

Cornice, trellis, pilaster, balcony, window, shutter, turret, porch […]

We can add to that list floors and bar-tops, thanks to the efforts of entrepreneurs like Todd Morrissette, former owner of DeadHead Lumber in Buxton, Maine. Starting in 2008, armed with a custom-made boat, underwater cameras, and a thick wad of permits, he located and pulled “sinkers” from the bottom of Moosehead Lake. Mostly hardwood logs, which sank more readily than spruce and fir, they were up to three feet in diameter and 36 feet long, weighing 15 tons when out of the water. “We did a core sample on one and found that it was cut in 1830 and was a sapling in 1601,” he says. Cut at his sawmill, the resulting birch and maple boards found their way into restaurants and homes all over the country. He sold the salvage equipment in 2016, but says it’s still the funnest job he’s ever had.