A. Mason & Sons of Peru, New York

By Neal Burdick

Sawmills were essential to America’s economic development and the building of communities. They provided work for mill hands, and in some companies, steady work and pensions. The sawmills allowed waste products to be used for other purposes, and supplied lumber not only to New York but to regions as far-flung as the South and the Midwest.

Neal Burdick is the grandson of Charles Mason, A. Mason & Sons’ draftsman who died during the flu pandemic of 1918-19, some 31 years before Burdick was born. He has childhood memories of the mill’s sawdust aroma and its five o’clock steam whistle signaling the end of the workday. The company no longer exists, having succumbed to pressure from “big boys” in the 1970s.
– William J. O’Hern

Soon after the Civil War, Albert Mason started a lumber milling operation on the Little Ausable River where it ran through the Clinton County village of Peru, New York, in the shadow of Huckleberry Mountain and the rest of the northeastern Adirondack foothills. His son George grew to maturity and joined the business, then George’s brother Nate, then Charles, and eventually Will, Ed, and Herb, the six strapping young men constituting the “& Sons” of the company. Charles was my maternal grandfather, but I never knew him; along with millions worldwide, he died in the great influenza pandemic of 1918, when my mother was just six years old. Each of the boys worked his way up through the ranks, and each was missing at least one finger, undeniable evidence that although he was part of “management” – the treasurer or a draftsman perhaps, he had nevertheless been expected to learn how to use the powerful circular saws, planers, lathes and other equipment necessary to a milling operation.

The A. Mason & Sons mill and shop about 1890. The horse-drawn cart in the right foreground carried sawdust from the mill to the shop’s boiler room for fuel. The barrels on the roof held water for fire suppression. The Mason complex included a blacksmith shop, far left, while the buildings in the left background were in the center of Peru village, uphill from the shallow valley of the Litte Ausable River.

Mason’s mill produced lumber for houses, barns, stores and so on, while an adjoining shop turned out woodwork, such as newel posts, stair railings, windows, doors, and residential trim. A. Mason & Sons’ craftsmanship can still be seen in countless houses throughout northeast New York State, but perhaps most noticeably in the woodwork of the Valcour Island lighthouse, now an historic site on Lake Champlain.

Theirs was an integrated operation; that is, they produced their own timber rather than buying it from jobbers. The Masons owned woodlots in the vicinity of Onchiota in southern Franklin County, from which they harvested the trees (mostly white pine, but some hardwoods for door sills and the like) that they then fashioned into either retail lumber or construction components. How they transported the logs the fifty-some-odd miles to the Peru mill I do not know; the lots were in the Saranac River watershed, which was too shallow to permit the iconic softwood log drives of Hudson River or Black River renown, and besides, the mill was in a different watershed. I suspect they shipped the raw material by rail to Plattsburgh via the Delaware & Hudson’s Chateaugay Branch, which despite its name ran between Saranac Lake and Plattsburgh, passing through Onchiota, and thence from Plattsburgh on the D&H’s Ausable Branch, which featured a siding for the mill on its way to its terminus in Ausable Forks.

The A. Mason & Sons mill and shop about 1910. Among the 20 workers pictured may be founder Albert Mason and some of his six sons. Mason’s also employed workers at its woodlots in Onchiota. The barrels on the roof held water for fire suppression. Below: As for those days gone by, a snapshot of a scene frozen in time is all that we have.

The Masons stored and seasoned their logs in an impoundment of the Little Ausable behind a low dam a few yards upstream from the mill. I remember the pond from my boyhood days of visiting my grandmother’s house, built and outfitted by A. Mason & Sons, just a few rods farther upstream: Clogged with logs, redolent of wet pine, soaked bark lying along the banks, and hordes of frogs who offered a free symphony chorus on summer evenings.

I also remember the stench of rotting wood scraps, other fibrous plant matter, and mud; these were the days before water pollution was of major concern, and clean water legislation was still a few years in the offing. Even the youngest of my five great-uncles were deceased by the time that all came along. I’ve often wondered what they would have said about environmental regulations, or for that matter what they thought of the Adirondack Forest Preserve and State Park legislation of 1885 and 1892 respectively. The company was in full swing then; did those steps hamper their operation and injure its profitability? The park law and the 1894 “forever wild” amendment to the state constitution were put in place in part because loggers were lax about recognizing or obeying the restrictions established by creation of the Forest Preserve; were my greatgrandfather, grandfather and great-uncles among the offenders, or did they foresee the value of forest conservation? By the time I was old enough to recognize this important question, they were no longer alive for me to ask.

Those regulations must not have hurt too much; the business thrived through the early years of the 20th century, and the Mason men built the finest homes in the village for themselves and their families. What did hurt was the Great Depression of the 1930s. In economic hard times, home-builders gave up luxuries like ornate pillars and balustrades. But the Masons refused to lay anyone off; in a small town where everyone knew everyone else and they were the largest single employer, they were determined not to put a breadwinner out of a job. Better to do with less themselves than force someone who’d been a faithful and reliable worker for years to do without. The men, mostly Irish and French Canadians, returned that loyalty by staying on, even if they had to make do with reduced wages.

After World War II came economic recovery, rapid growth, and a housing boom, and business throttled up again. The Masons, now down to three of the six sons of Albert, plus some of their children – third generation in the family business – expanded with a retail lumber yard in Plattsburgh. But competition from the “big boys” like Weyerhauser and 84 Lumber, along with foreign interests, proved increasingly hard to overcome. They branched out into wholesale and retail hardware and building supplies, but the Big Box competition was overwhelming there, too. Truth be told, lack of interest on the part of the third generation also played a part.

In the mid-1970s, after more than 100 years in operation, A. Mason & Sons, like lots of “Mom and Pop” (and all the kids) operations all over the Adirondacks and indeed the nation, folded. The mill closed down, and both it and the lumber yard in Plattsburgh eventually became the sites of low-income subsidized housing – a touch of irony, since the Masons had made home-building components for so long. The dam was breached, and the Little Ausable returned to the quiet and sweet-smelling stream it had once been. A small plaque mounted on a stone indicates the site of the mill, and the family name remains in perpetuity here and there in Peru, as on the facade of the Mason Memorial Library, which the family donated to their community.

One of my favorite memories of Mason’s mill is the sound of the mill’s shrill steam whistle signaling, for all the town to hear, the end of each workday. That whistle has been silenced for many years now, but I still hear it in reveries of my childhood, of an Adirondack way of life now mostly an echo across time.

A Look Back In Time

Published in The Northern Logger magazine, February 2024

I met Pat O’Brien in the fall of 1977 when I was invited to sit among a group of long-retired men, who earlier in their lives had a connection with the logging industry. The gathering place was Joe and Madge Conway’s home in Woodgate, New York.

I was there to witness the first of what came to be many other assemblages that were videotaped by Mary Teal. Teal was a long-time Lyons Falls History Association historian/archivist.

Pat O’Brien was an exemplary conversationalist.

He enjoyed talking about his connection with log jobbers, truck drivers, white-water men, cooks and the meals they prepared, lumber camps – just about everything connected to the “lumber woods.”
O’Brien grew up in the Adirondack North Country in the 1930s, when lumbering was still big business. The ring of the axe and the thundering crash of the giant trees that punctuated the otherwise silent atmosphere in the virgin forest were strong in his memory.

I thought of him as a living encyclopedia of logging history. His knowledge was vast. He fielded many questions, including names, dates of events, details of lumbering companies, and so much more.

From him I picked up logging terms. “Corks” stood for calks – the sharp, pointed nails on soles and heels of river jacks’ boots. The needle-sharp points provided the dexterity for the “bubblewalkers” to “dance” from log-to-log, prodding thirteen-foot softwood logs with peaveys down through dangerous stretches of “white water” where a “catty” might “wash their clothes.”

But for all O’Brien’s forest industry information, he truly shined with his natural story-telling talent. Here’s how he described the unconventional outhouses:

They were not your regular variety. No individual seats but instead a peeled pole stretching across a dug trench where 10 to 15 men could sit together … across it. I recall this one camp I worked at had a number of awfully big men and it must have been the biggest man who had constructed the slit trench outhouse because he (Pat stretched as he demonstrated) was about as high as the peeled poles stood off the ground horizontally. I’d have to get a running leap to get up on it and you sure as shooting wanted to keep your balance and not slip off.

Since your feet couldn’t touch the ground, you’d have to concentrate on what you were doing because you sure as hell knew where you’d fall if you didn’t. And he described the men’s quarters in the lumber camps. “The smell of the bunkroom … well, nothing was worse.

You can’t imagine it where some 50 to 75 men lived and slept, with never really any chance to bathe thoroughly, launder their socks and clothing, bedding, whatever.”

Bed bugs and body lice were a recurring dilemma. It was the job of each ’jack to shake all the straw out of his personal cloth-covered mattress and boil the cover in one of the great black iron kettles also used to boil clothing. The covers were then refilled with new straw. “A deterrent for bed bugs was to spray the bunk bed boards with kerosene,” Pat said.

A pasty mixture of roofing tar and lard spread over one’s skin helped ward off mosquitoes and punkies. “Oh, and there was red lice. They come in under the wings of bats.” Pat joked, “I liked to go down to the big horse barns because they smelled so much better than the men’s camps.”

For all of Pat’s storytelling, he made it very clear that while the old days might seem exciting and colorful, l should have no illusion about the forestry industry. The work was hard, the hours were long and there was constant danger. In his later years, he worked for the Gould Paper Company and later as a scaler for Georgia Pacific at Lyons Falls, NY.

“I recall my son once telling me that he wanted to grow up and be a lumberjack just like me,” O’Brien told me. “I didn’t cotton to his admiration of my timber industry profession because of the long hours, hard dangerous work, and long periods away from home. I could have killed him!”

Pat didn’t pull any punches with me either.

Indeed, Pat was a gifted story teller right up to his death. He is the only person I know who insisted on two grave plots and stones. One stone has the typical inscription. For another burial plot, his headstone reads: “See, I told you I was sick.”

On my last visit with Pat, he handed me a typed copy of his original poem, “Log Drive: You or the Devil or God.” He told me the inspiration for the lines came to him on September 10, 1980 when he spotted a familiar old-timer’s gravestone on one of many walks he enjoyed taking through the “ground of memories.”

Pat had a “feeling” for the ’jacks of earlier days. His poem captures the risk and hard life involved in what he called “following the wood by water.” Each time I pass by the Constableville cemetery my thoughts drift back to him.

Pat O’Brien is highlighted in Chapter 29 of “Adirondack Logging: Life and Times in the Early Years of Logging’s Mechanization,” by William J. O’Hern.

Article Printed in “The Northern Logger”, Sept. 2023

BY HOWARD THOMAS

The following is a compilation of stories collected by Upstate New York folklore enthusiast, Howard Thomas, and published in Folklore from The Adirondack Foothills (Prospect Books, 1958). It appears here with the permission of Bob Igoe, president and owner of North Country Books.— William J. O’Hern

One afternoon in May 1909, Mrs. Lowell Odit was hanging up clothes behind her home overlooking Wilmurt Falls on the West Canada when she heard a cry for help rise above the roar of the creek. Looking upstream, she saw a man riding a log. As she watched, the log rolled and threw its rider into the water. He rose to the surface and clutched the end of the log.

“Low!” Mrs. Odit cried to her husband, “There’s a man in the creek above the falls. He’ll go over them for sure.”

Low rushed to his wife’s side as the man cried, “Goodbye. I got to go!” and was carried over the falls into the pond which backed up water for Richards’ mill. The Odits gasped in amazement, for Wilmurt Falls had always been considered a death trap, but the log had picked the one course possible to get the man through. The danger was far from over, for a second fall at the mill dam would undoubtedly prove fatal.

“It’s Muggins Laird,” gasped Low. “He ain’t no swimmer.” He carried a long board to the creek’s edge and stretched out on his stomach on an overhanging hemlock where he could push the board within reach of the man in the water.

“Swim a little, Muggins,” cried Low.

“I can’t. I’m all numb and can’t move.”

Odit coaxed Muggins’ log with his board and drew it toward him until he could get a hold on Muggins’ shirt.

Slowly, but surely, he got Muggins to shore and to the house, where the riverjack warmed himself, had a cup of strong coffee, and marched back up the river in his wet clothes, thankful that he had received no more than a bad ducking.

Rivermen wore heavy woolens, so they were not afraid of a spill into the water. Nor did the fact that many of them could not swim a stroke deter them from taking chances with dangerous rapids. The men were joking with George Dolly, a husky, two-hundred-pounder who had little skill with the peavey and was unable to swim. Dolly, tired of the joshing, bet the others ten dollars he could get down through a particularly rough stretch of “white water” unscathed. The men tried to dissuade Dolly, but they covered his money.

Dolly picked up a peavey and jumped onto a log, which he pushed toward the rapids. He lasted one split second. Soon he was thrashing around like a walrus as the current carried him downstream. Watchers along the shore could see first an arm, then a leg, and occasionally Dolly’s head. They felt sure the big fellow was riding to his death. Dolly had other ideas. He eddied around in the swirling water and rolled and tumbled to shore to receive his ten dollars.

One of the most daring river rescues took place near the bridge at McKeever, in April 1914. John B. Todd, superintendent of the Gould Paper Company drive, had already saved one man from going over a fall below the bridge by throwing him a rope and drawing him to the boom above the fall. His boss riverman, Jim Haley, was destined to perform a greater miracle.

Heavy rains had caused logs to jam against the McKeever Bridge piers. More logs tumbled against them, with the result that the jam resembled a huge game of jackstraws with the Moose River racing beneath it. Riverjacks were sent out with peaveys to loosen some logs from the mass and send them into the rushing current.

When the jam broke with a roar, Jack McGee, a green hand, was unable to leave the logs. The other jacks saw his peril and yelled for him to run up the jam. Instead, he became panic-stricken and did nothing.

Jim Haley, who was standing on the bridge, yelled for McGee to lie down on the logs, with the hope that he would pass under the bridge safely. McGee chose one log instead of two or three. He was swept under the bridge and into the river.

Haley heard the cry, “He’s in!” He grabbed a peavey, leaped from the bridge to a dancing log, dug his “corks” [caulks, or boot cleats] in, balanced himself, and jumped from log to log in McGee’s direction. When he had overtaken the drowning man, Haley sank his peavey into his log, braced himself, and drew McGee out of the water. Holding the almost unconscious man over his knees, he directed the log to shore and safety.