WRITTEN BY AISLINN SARNACKI
The most forested state in the nation, Maine is a land of trees. Towering pines, bone white birch, fragrant firs, and windswept spruce. The people of this area have long relied on these abundant resources.
For thousands of years, the indigenous tribes of the region have crafted birch bark canoes and brown ash baskets, sealed seams with pine pitch sap, and carved root clubs out of gray birch and poplar.
When Europeans arrived in the 1600s, they quickly began cutting down trees to construct settlements and build ships. In fact, the King of England claimed the largest of Maine’s white pine trees as his own personal property, to be harvested as masts for sailing vessels.
“It really bothered the early settlers at the time,” said Bob Frank, Jr., a retired U.S. Forest Service forester from Hampden. “[People working for the King of England] went into the woods and they marked trees with three marks, and you were not allowed, as a pioneer, to touch those trees. If you did, I guess there was quite a penalty.”
Back in the 1950s and 60s, Frank was among a group of volunteers who created the Maine Forest and Logging Museum, a nonprofit organization that preserves and shares the history of the logging industry in Maine. And what a fascinating history it is.
Logging Camp Days
In just a few hundred years, timber harvesting in Maine has created communities, spurred the creation of roads, bolstered the economy, and helped shape the state’s culture.
“The North Woods of Maine grow all the trees you need for almost any product,” Frank said. “If you want to make pulp and paper, spruce and fir is the best. If you want to use cedar for canoes or log cabins, we grow a lot of cedar. We have a good array of hardwoods, from maple to yellow birch to white ash. It’s such a great smorgasbord of trees that any industry that wants to make something can come to Maine and find its trees here.”
With advancements in technology and an ever-changing demand for various tree products, the industry is continually changing.
Around 1820, loggers began sleeping in primitive camps, according to the Patten Lumbermen’s Museum. Like the Maine Forest and Logging Museum in Bradley, the Patten museum’s mission is to preserve and share the state’s rich logging history.
These early logging camps consisted of a 20-by-20-foot log structure built around a fire pit. This cozy abode, usually topped with a cedar shake roof, housed about a dozen men who shared a giant mattress of fragrant balsam fir needles.
“It was a fascinating life,” said Rhonda Brophy, who’s in her 19th season as the curator and administrator of the Patten Lumbermen’s Museum. “These men were gone from probably October until May [at the logging camps]. So it’s the women back home who had to take care of the kids, the house, the animals, and this was back before electricity. It was very hard, I think, on women.”
Some of Brophy’s favorite items at the museum are boxes made of hollow spruce that lumbermen carved sayings and scenes into, then filled with spruce gum to take home to their wives. The gum was chewed to freshen your breath, Brophy explained.
Also at the museum, you can explore two replicas of the logging camps: the simple, 1820s camp and what’s known as the “double camp,” which is larger, with a kitchen area that’s separate from where the men sleep.
“The same men would go back to the same camps, year after year,” she said. “I’m sure they liked the comradery.”
Logging was done primarily in the winter because it was easiest to transport timber over the snow in horse-drawn sleds. As the land thawed each spring, logs were dumped into streams and rivers that were swollen with spring run-off. The water would then carry them to ports that connected to the ocean, such as Bangor.
Log Drives and Timber Mills
By 1832, Bangor had become the largest shipping port for lumber in the world, with as many as 3,000 ships anchored at any given time. Each spring, logs harvested farther north were floated down the Penobscot River to Bangor-area mills. These massive log drives were the most efficient way of transporting the wood to the ocean, where it could be shipped far and wide.
“This was before the roads were created,” Brophy said. “So they used the rivers as roads. And if a log got hung up, they had to keep them moving.”
Log drivers wore caulk boots, which were covered with metal spikes that helped them walk across floating logs. They also used a long, wooden tool called a peavey to move the logs and break up jams. With a metal spike and hook on the end, the peavey was invented in 1858 by Maine blacksmith Joseph Peavey.
This method of moving timber persisted for many years. Maine’s last log drive was in 1976 on the Kennebec River.
Today, log rolling and other traditional lumberjack skills are celebrated throughout the Northeast and Canada. The University of Maine, for example, organizes a co-ed “woodsmen team” to compete against other universities in lumberjack skill events.
Aspects of the log drive days also permeate Maine’s culture, with peaveys and old crosscut saws displayed in restaurants and sporting camps, and bean-hole beans a favorite dish for community dinners.
“For bean-hole beans, the cook would go ahead of the men on the drive and get their meals ready for them,” Brophy explained. “They cooked the beans in the ground because they didn’t have any real stoves. It would act like a slow cooker.”
Changing times
By 1846, Maine was home to about 1,500 sawmills. In 1868, Maine’s first mill to produce pulp commercially was up and running in Topsham. And in 1883, large pulp mills were established in Old Town.
As technology advanced, logging and the production of wood products changed.
Perhaps the greatest of these changes was at the turn of the century. Patented in 1901, the Lombard steam log hauler was designed by Waterville blacksmith Alvin Orlando Lombard. Now featured in the Mechanical Engineering Hall of Fame, this steam-powered machine transported logs through the forest in place of horses and sleds.
“He had the first patent for a cleat track, which is what you see on tanks and bulldozers today,” Brophy said.
More machinery followed, with gasoline log haulers, tractors, and power saws coming into use.
“I remember being invited to go look at [the Beloit tree harvester] because it was the first big machine to eliminate human effort to cut trees,” Frank said. “That was the first of many machines.”
Ongoing scientific research also impacts how logging is done in Maine. In the Penobscot Experimental Forest, where Frank worked for over 30 years, a number of experiments have been in the process for decades.
“I don’t care what year it is, there’s always some kind of pathogen, usually an insect, that’s bothering a species of trees that’s in the Maine forest, whether it’s softwood or hardwood,” Frank said. “I don’t know of any [tree] species that’s insect-proof.”
Spruce budworm. Hemlock wooly adelgid. Emerald ash borer. Beech bark scale. These pests challenge foresters to come up with new ways to keep forests healthy.
Though times have certainly changed, Maine people continue to work in the woods, harvesting trees and creating products to ship around the world. Yet Maine remains the most forested state in the nation, with 89 percent of the land covered by forest.
“Thank God that trees grow,” Frank said with a laugh.
