Part one of two parts:
The earliest loggers in this area were from Maine, employees of a Maine-based company called the Pomeroy Lumbering Company. Their initial operation consisted of a small sawmill located on the outlet of today’s Big Wolf Pond, which they called Kitteridge Lake.
As was custom in those early lumbering days, when transportation was largely undeveloped, they cut in a circle rarely more than a three-mile circumference surrounding the sawmill. When that source was depleted, they moved the sawmill to another stand. Pomeroy moved from Big Wolf to the virgin pine along Racquette Pond, then called Lake Whitney, and later, Lough Neagh, after a lake in Ireland. The clearing they left behind would become, some 40 years later, the site of our present village.
Maine Lumbermen and, later, those from the Maritime Provinces, who were called P.I.s (Prince Edward Island), were considered without equal as lumbermen. They were famous throughout the United States for their ability and the knowledge of their peculiar tools and methods. They were also considered reliable workmen who know how to handle an axe or a team of horses. Note: Many were hard-working farmers, and in the slack season, they would leave the womenfolk to milk the cows and do the necessary chores, and they would take to the woods to earn a few welcome dollars.
As a matter of interest, many readers will be familiar with one of those peculiar Maine tools – a tool they called a Peavey, named after its inventor, a blacksmith from Stillwater, Maine. According to Robert Pike, in his anecdotal lumbering history, Tall Trees, Tough Men, it was originally called a cant dog or cant hook and was used for lifting and prying logs, both in loading sleds and on river drives.
Pike tells us: “It originally consisted of a straight, heavy handle set into an iron socket that might or might not be pointed and fitted with a swivel hook that had nothing to hold it in position and was as likely to miss catching a log when a logger made a pass at it as it was to grab hold. In 1868, Joseph Peavey, a blacksmith at Stillwater, Maine, was watching through the cracks of a wooden bridge, the river men working beneath him and swearing at their refractory hooks. Right then and there Joseph had an idea that revolutionized the logging industry. Returning to his blacksmith shop, he made a rigid clasp to encircle the cant dog handle, with lips on one side. These lips were drilled to take a bolt that would hold the hook, or dog, in place, allowing it to move up or down but not sideways. It was a marvelous invention and it rolled billions of feet of logs into American rivers, but Joe got drunk on his way to get the thing patented and a friend stole the patent from him. It is good to know, however, that regardless of patent ownership, he manufactured his brainchild and did right well with it. The Peavey gravestone in the Bangor cemetery bears a large letter P crossed by two beautifully carved peavies.”
Note: A peavey in excellent condition, which was used in area river drives, part of the late Greg Smith collection, has been gifted to the Tupper Lake Museum Gallery by Greg’s brother, John.
The “Yankees” from Maine stayed in the Tupper sector for only a short time. Maine, after all, was then the leader in the logging business, and while later many of the Maine men would follow the receding pines westward to Pennsylvania, Michigan and even Wisconsin and Minnesota, there was plenty of opportunity in their home state. Thus, when the arrival of the railroads here and the attendant opening of the sawmills, which catapulted Tupper Lake to the leading lumbering capital in New York State, the labor force in the lumbering business was locally made up of largely French Canadians. For example, the Santa Clara Lumber crews here for many years were at least three-fourths French Canadian, according to Ferris Meigs in his autobiography, The Santa Clara Company.
In writing about French Canadians, Pike says, “They often had more than a score of children in a family.” As a result, they sometimes ran out of names and resorted to numbers instead. He recalled a Vingt-Six (French for 26) Gagnon from Three Rivers, Quebec.
Frequently a camp would not have a single English-speaking lumberjack in it and in the mornings, long before sunrise, the cry “Se Levez! Se Levez!” would echo throughout the bunkroom. (C’est le heure a lever, as I think my former and wonderful French teacher, Mrs. Austin, would have explained.)
By and large, the Canucks, according to Pike, were “small, trim, quick men, fond of gay sashes and toques and unsurpassed with an axe.” Note to local readers: Have you ever called your woolen ski hat a “toque” and had a nonresident wonder to what you were referring? The axe was the French Canadians’ natural weapon, and they handled and practiced with it until they acquired unbelievable dexterity. They could throw an axe at a running rat and spit it in two, or they could hurl is at a mark 15 yards away and hit it three time out of three.
Many observers have claimed that the French Canadians were the best river drivers, a dangerous and very difficult skill, and it has been said that good river men were “born, not made.” Many had developed their skills as youngsters on the rivers in Canada, learning early how to handle a pike pole and a peavey on the still waters of the mill booms so common in this area until better transportation methods and the emerging market for hardwood, which didn’t float, rendered such drives obsolete.
The last river drive occurred here in 1935 when jobbers like Gasper LaPorte, George MacDonald and quick-footed river men like young Alex Reandeau, among others, drove logs from Whitney Realty lands down the Little Tupper outlet and I.P. lands along Bear Brook and the Bog River and over the falls to Tupper Lake, where they were towed down the lake to the mills on Racquette Pond. Or driven further down the Racquette River to other mills such as Piercefield and Colton.
As a youngster, I remember always being able to recognize a lumberjack who was a river driver when they would hit town after the completion of the spring drive. His wool Malone, or Ballard, pants were always stagged – or cut off above his boot tops. He walked with a sort of swagger, a river man’s walk. Note: Probably because river drivers, whose feet were immersed in cold water for hours on end, would often paint their feet with white lead, and most camps would have a barrel of lard near the door, which the river driver could use to put inside his socks before putting them on. For many years, many of the floors in the hotels of my youth were pockmarked from the spikes in their boots, known as Croghans, which was where the best boots were made – a town now famous for its bologna. These boots were his badge. The spikes were core-hardened and resembled yesterday’s golf shoes, and they were called calks (pronounced “corks”).
River drivers lived in danger most of the time on the drives, especially when the dams were opened to flush the logs downstream, and mild rapids became wild, raging torrents. Perhaps that was why river men were known to be a feisty bunch with a confident, devil-may-care attitude.
One anecdote tells of a river driver going into Larry Rafferty’s Hotel Altamont in this village, where longtime employee, Jim Sullivan, was tending bar. Jim knew his customers and had a good sense of humor. As the story goes, one day a fierce lumberjack strode into the bar and bellowed to Jim, “They tell me you’re the man who sells the stuff. All right, give me some!”
Jim just looked him over and made no haste to answer. The man went on, “I’m a son of a bitch from Black River, and I want service.”
Jim, still polishing his bar, said, “I knew you were a son of a bitch the minute you opened your mouth, but I didn’t know you were from Black River.”
To be continued in the next Transitions.