In the last Transitions, mention was made of the south boundary of the Macomb Purchase. That line ended at Preston Ponds, recently purchased from the National Lead Company by the Open Space Institute, with plans in place to make it part of the state’s public land holdings.
In early times, the ponds were referred to as the Upper, Middle and Lower Prestons. Lower Preston became known as the Duck Hole, and today’s reference to Preston Ponds generally means Lower (formerly Middle) and Upper. All three are still connected by water with the outlet of Duck Hole spilling over a dam and becoming the Cold River, which flows 18 miles before it joins the Raquette River just downstream of Long Lake’s outlet.
Many readers of this column know the Preston Ponds-Cold River area well. Indeed, a number of local nimrods, this writer among them, were hunting in that section the last day of the open whitetail season on Nov. 25, 1950. Most of us will not soon forget it. That was the day of the Great Storm, the Big Blow or simply the Blowdown, as it was variously called. The winds picked up about midmorning that day, and when limbs and then entire trees started falling everywhere with terrifying crashes, day hunters like myself hit for home on the double. (Winds up to 100 miles per hour were recorded that night.)
Others, hunting further from the trailhead out of tent camps, were not so fortunate. Those hunters were marooned, locked in by a complete blockade of fallen trees. Amazingly, no hunter in the Cold River section was injured. It took one group, who traditionally used mules to bring in supplies to their Ward Brook site, three days using chainsaws and the mules’ drawing power to clear their way and meet up with Tupper Lake forest ranger Delbert McNeil and crew coming in from Corey’s direction.
The wind had come from the east and northeast, and the mature trees had grown wind-firm in the direction of the normal prevailing west winds. The soft woods, especially a lot of virgin spruce with their shallow root system, suffered severe destruction from nature’s sucker punch.
The Cold River-Preston Ponds area would never gain be the same place. Thirteen thousand, seven hundred acres – 100 percent down, another 10,000 acres, half of which were down (Conservation Dept. Survey). The woods were an almost impenetrable jungle of twisted, toppled, jack-strawed piles of timber, so dangerous and so vulnerable to fire that almost all of the area was closed for five years. No hunting, fishing, hiking or travel of any kind. (You can imagine how anxious everyone was to get to some of the remote ponds when that authority against trespass was finally lifted.)
The next major change to our Cold River country came in the form of an amendment to the “forever wild” provision in the state constitution that decreed, “The timber on lands constituting the Forest Preserve cannot be sold, removed or destroyed.” The Attorney General, with the approval of the legislature, gave the green light and the authority to the Conservation Dept. (today’s D.E.C) to proceed with salvage work “given the extreme fire hazard and the foolish waste of a valuable resource.” Lumbering would once again take place in Cold River.
Contracts for lumbering were let on a bid process, the bids depending on estimates of pulpwood and the board feet of saw timber, hard or soft, that might be salvaged. A number of local loggers won contracts. Wilfred Madore would have a crew in the Raquette Falls section (today’s Calkins Brook Horse Trail was one of his haul roads). Also bidding was the U.S. Bobbin and Shuttle, whose plant was then located, interesting enough, near LeBoeuf’s Street. Alfred LeBoeuf was a famed woods superintendent for the Santa Clara Lumber Company, which once owned most of Cold River (sold to the state in 1919).
In 1952, the Bobbin Company salvaged 120,000 cords in the Cold River and National Lead tracts (Barbara McMartin). They would close their Tupper Lake plant in 1953 after only four years here, during which time they employed as many as 100 people in addition to the 125 in their logging operations. Ed Bohin and his father had a sawmill above Coreys known as The Thick and Thin Lumber Company (not exactly a state-of-the-art mill). Roy Parent and crew would later push a road through from Coreys (Ampersand to Shatuck Clearing), a part of which is today’s Cold River Horse Trail system.
Those are only a few of the local people involved in the salvage operation where, in earlier times, their fathers and grandfathers had earned the reputation of being unsurpassed with an axe or a team of horses and had “let the light in.” The days when you stayed in a log camp all winter and each day, long before first light, woke up to the call of “Star Leve” (Get Up). A contraction of the French C’est l’heure a se lever – it is the hour to rise.
The primary reason for allowing the lumbering operation was, of course, the fear of fire. The recent disastrous fires this fall in California provide proof that this was a genuine concern, and that the downed timber was tinder-ready to ignite if there was a lightning strike in that remote country that would smolder and then burst into flame uncontrolled.
Next article – that nightmare becomes a reality.