BY TED ABER AND STELLA KING
The following is Part 2 of a story by Ted Aber and Stella King that first appeared in Tales From An Adirondack County (Prospect Books, 1981). Part 1 was featured in the June 2023 issue of The Northern Logger. The story appears here with permission of Rob Igoe, president and owner of North Country Books. Aber and King were devout local historians. It is to their effort that so much early Hamilton County, NY first-person history has been documented.
—William J. O’Hern
Allie O’Kane and Henry Brooks were once working at a skidway. They had successfully placed about 3,000 pieces of heavy timber on the skidway when a big tree twisted and became wedged. It was mighty irksome. Allie grumbled that he’d be darned if he would move the offensive tree. He wasn’t being paid for such work, he declared, and the two continued piling logs. Two days later, the observant Ernie confronted his two employees.
“A couple of the men are sick,” he told them, no doubt smiling to himself. “I’ll have to ask you to unload.”
Embittered but helpless, Allie and Henry worked themselves to a frenzy moving each log by hand because the wedged tree had not earlier been removed.
The lumberjacks were loyal to Ernie. One thing they knew, as they performed the back-breaking labor hours on end: they would always be paid generously. You could always depend on Ernie to pull the job through. His innate fairness and human understanding further championed him among his men.
“Ernie once left me back in the woods to cut lumber for him,” Sandford Courtney said. “He left me twenty-five dollars’ worth of food. When he came to settle, he paid me for more work than I’d done and more than the marker estimated. That’s the way Ernie was.” The lumberman had a way with people that could not be denied.
Hi Craig of Wells, an accomplished wood-cutter, had always worked at lumbering, but he had decided to work at something else, at least for a time. Hi was working in a glove shop at Wells, when Ernie arrived to ask the woodsman and his wife to take charge of his lumber camp headquarters.
I’m not going to work in a lumber camp,” Hi told him with determination. At the same time, he realized he and his wife needed money to build a house. Ernie’s guarantee of $1,000 sounded good.
“I’ll give you a week to make up your mind,” Ernie said. Wavering some, Hi agreed to leave the decision to his wife. Ernie knew he had won his case.
The Craigs took the job, but only with the agreement that Hi could have his old job of cutting wood.
One day, Ernie came to him, characteristically chewing tobacco.
“You’ll have to come to camp,” he instructed the woodcutter. “I just fired a choreboy.”
Hi fumed. “I told you I wouldn’t be choreboy,” he protested.
Ernie set to work on Hi’s better instincts. The choreboy had been lazy, making the work too hard for Mrs. Craig, he explained.
Reluctantly, Hi left his axe to go back to camp.
“At the end of the season, Ernie gave us a bonus and told us to stay and rest for a couple of days,” Hi tells. When the two protested, Ernie insisted that they had saved him a great deal of money by getting the men up and out on time.
Brooks’ sense of humor was well-recognized.
Back at Newton’s Corners, now known by the new-fangled name of Speculator, he liked to leave his hotel of an evening to stop in at Robb Stuart’s general store. It was the typical country gathering place, where the men sat on a winter’s night, telling stories while they chewed tobacco and spat at the stove.
One night, the lumberman and a companion hit upon a well-laid plan. First one, then the other, would cough and sneeze, commenting on the bad colds they had acquired. Listening with apprehension, Robb finally concluded that he, too, was coming down with a severe cold. Robb sneezed a couple of times, went straight to bed and called the doctor.
One day, Ernie was walking down the road with a bag in his hand. Amelia Wilber wanted to know what the bag contained.
“Beechnuts,” replied the lumberman promptly. What’s more, they weren’t old beechnuts, he told her, but just freshly picked that winter’s day. He explained that the beechnuts had stayed on some of the trees and, when the wind blew, they were coming down and rolling into the hollow in the snow at the base of the trees.
A short time later, Ernie chuckled inwardly as he watched Amelia and some youngsters walking up the road. Amelia carried an empty bag in her hand.
A legend ended in 1935. Forest fires raged along the mountains surrounding the Sacandaga Reservoir and all forest rangers were called to assist. It was at that time that the mother of Halsey Page, the local forest ranger, died. Halsey asked Ernie to go in his place while he attended his mother’s funeral.
The firefighters were to be taken across the reservoir by boat. When they were ready to set out, it was obvious to Ernie that the craft was badly overloaded. Out on the water, the boat rocked precariously with each movement of its occupants. Suddenly, it overturned, dumping its human cargo into the deep waters of the lake. Five men were drowned.
Ernie Brooks had died in his sixty-third year. Neighbors at Speculator felt that somehow an age had ended.