Pat O’Brien

March 1, 2024March 1, 2024 Lucinda

Pat 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 …

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.”

Log Drive:
You or the Devil or God
If we go back in folklore
As we go back in our lives,
We always hear tell
Of the loose-living hell
Working the Moose River Drives.
Working the River was danger
During the break-up thaw,
Many men drowned
And never were found
Life on the River was raw.
Driving the wood on the River
To fill the company needs,
All in the name of progress,
Part of the rivermen’s breed.
Born to take neck-breaking chances,
Trained to take breath-taking rides;
Hard-working, hard-drinking woodsmen,
With genuine shoe leather hides.
Times were tough and so were the men.
The pay was two dollars and board.
The water was cold, the water was deep,
As the logs and the Moose River roared.
The River would drown you quick as a wink,
If your caulks didn’t hold in the log.
No man could save you, if you fell in,
It was you, or the devil, or God.
God wasn’t acquainted with many,
He scarcely knew a score,
But the devil knew all the rest,
He had seen them raise hell before.
It took a special breed of men
To take chances with their lives,
To get the logs to Lyons Falls,
On the Old Moose River Drive.
– Original Poem by Pat O’Brien,
September 10, 1980

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.

A Look Back In Time – The Fabulous Carnahans – Part Two

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023 Lucinda

By Howard Thomas

Log drive — Spring, to all connected with logging meant only one thing – the annual log drive.

This is Part 2 of “The Fabulous Carnahans,” a story among many collected by upstate New York folklore enthusiast, Howard Thomas. It appears here with permission of Bob Igoe, president and owner of North Country Books, Utica, N.Y. Look for Part 1 in the October 2023 issue.—William J. O’Hern

*Cleanup crews worked from boats as a sort of a “rear guard” to make sure that every last log reached its destination. They also aided in rescues in dangerous situations.*

Two years after the Carnahan brothers came to Wilmurt, New York, Sol was conducting the Trenton Falls Lumber Company’s spring drive near Jock’s Lake outlet. The creek was at flood peak, a boiling, seething mass of brown water. A dangerous jam developed, so Ab took Dan Pinney and a boatman and rode to the head of the jam, where he and Dan jumped onto the logs while the boatman remained ready to take them to shore when the jam broke.

The two riverjacks went to work with their peaveys and succeeded in loosening logs near a big rock. The jam began to move before they could get back to the boat, and the creek became filled with dancing, tumbling logs. Ab and Dan jumped from log to log to get as near shore as possible. Seeing open water ahead, they each selected a log and began to ride it, paddling and pushing toward shore with their peaveys. Ab made out well, but Pinney was being drawn toward rapids which led to a waterfall no man had ever ridden successfully. Ab, seeing his pal’s predicament, deliberately placed his peavey against Dan’s log and sent it toward shore. The force of the shove sent Ab’s log back into the stream, but he paddled back and gave Dan’s log another push. Pinney jumped from his log and swam to the shore and safety.

Log jam buster — *BOOM! Massive log jams caused dangerous conditions for river drivers and needed to be blown with dynamite to create open channels.*

Not so Carnahan. His log was caught by the swirling water. With great skill, he “cuffed” the log into position and faced the white water ahead. He might have ridden to safety, but the log struck a submerged rock. He was thrown far ahead into the roaring stream. Pinney saw him rise to the surface only to be crushed to death between two colliding logs. His body was recovered hours later far down the creek. Sol took it to New Brunswick for burial. Ab Carnahan, at the age of twenty-two, had given his life to save that of another man.

Erv stayed on with Sol. Like Ab, he was a soft-spoken, intelligent lad who did many errands for his elder brother, for his drinking habits had eliminated him from work on the rivers.

Sol was driving logs up in the Moose River country one spring and Erv was sent to Utica for the payroll money. Muggins Laird wanted to go along, though Erv and Sol both knew Muggins would kill a man to get a drink of liquor. Sol waited patiently for payroll money that never arrived. Erv and Muggins were seen getting off the train and starting toward the Carnahan lumber camp. That was the last anyone ever saw of Erv Carnahan.

Old-timers say that fingers of suspicion were pointed at Muggins, who seems to have won the dislike of all the jacks, but nothing could ever be proved. Eph Wheeler, who knew Sol well in the old days, said that he met Sol in a Utica hotel a few years before Sol’s death. Eph asked Sol if he had any word from Erv, whereupon Sol shook his head sadly.

*The dangerous work of the river drivers often captured the attention of crowds of spectators to witness the annual river drive.*

The Carnahans have become more or less of a legend along West Canada Creek. The few men left who once worked for Sol will always say, “Sol Carnahan? He was a great old Sol.”

Spring break up is signaled when the frost comes out of the log hauling roads and the ice breaks up in the rivers. River drivers relied on the natural runoff to float the 1-foot, 4-inch softwood logs downriver through frequent falls, rapids, and natural rock barriers.

A Look Back In Time – The Fabulous Carnahans

October 2, 2023October 2, 2023 Lucinda

By Howard Thomas

Published in Northern Logger, Oct. 2023

Sol Carnahan’s name is part of logging fame along with names like Dan McCauley, Jim McBeth, Tim Dunn, Henry Kreizer, Jim Hill, George Abbott, and John B. Todd – all charter members, for they were the great men of the river drives. The raw-bone men were familiar with river driving terms such as the “raw right-angled jam,” the “wing jam,” and the “key log,” terms not used in today’s logging operations.

These popular bosses, wrote Howard Thomas in Folklore from the Adirondack Foothills (Prospect Books, 1958), “had a flair for handling not only logs but men, from the stolid ‘pig-yokers’ who worked near shore to the flashy, temperamental riverjacks who risked life and limb in order to break jams and get the logs down the amber streams to the mills.”

Carnahan was born in McKinleyville, New Brunswick, Canada on March 17, 1878. As a young man he went to Maine and worked as a lumberman, eventually moving to northern New York where he began lumbering for himself. He operated logging camps in Wells, Speculator, Lake Pleasant, Wilmurt, Hinckley, Poland, and in the Black and West Canada river areas.

Mr. Carnahan was a Republican in politics, and while in Herkimer county operated a hotel in Noblesboro in the Town of Wilmurt and was active as a public officer. From 1890 to 1892 he was road commissioner in the Town of Wilmurt and in 1902 was supervisor for one term.

In 1908 Sol moved to Cooperstown where he carried on various lumbering jobs as well as owned and operated a large dairy farm until moving to Morris and then Guilford, where he continued work as an active farmer in Chenango county for 30 years until his death at the age of 70 in 1947.

“The Fabulous Carnahans” offers a unique look at a legendary logging personality. The story is among many collected by upstate New York folklore enthusiast, Howard Thomas. It appears here with permission of Bob Igoe, president and owner of North Country Books, Utica, NY.

– William J. O’Hern

Log Jam — Working a log jam on the Moose River.

Sol Carnahan came down from New Brunswick in the early 1890s to take charge of a log drive on West
Canada Creek. He was so homesick at first that he refused to answer letters from his relatives for fear that they would write back to him. He felt more at home when his wife and his two younger brothers, Ab and Erv, joined him in Wilmurt.

Sol conducted drives down West Canada Creek and the Black and Moose Rivers for years. No river boss ever
gained more respect from his men. When Sol retired to finish out his years on a farm near Cooperstown, the riverjacks and pig-yokers sensed that they had lost their dearest friend.

Sol knew his job from A to Z. In his younger days, he was so good at driving logs that he was rewarded with the highest praise given to a man in his profession – the nickname of “bubble-walker.” Though Sol could not swim a stroke, he probably took more chances than any riverjack in the foothills. To celebrate one Fourth of July at Bellingertown, he rode through the white water of a flooded Black River with his peavey held straight up before
him, and sailed under the bridge to the applause of a group of rivermen who had gathered to see his performance.

Riverjacks and pig-yorkers respected Sol. “Pig-yorkers” were men who followed along the shoreline and pushed logs back into the river that became beached or jammed up in some way.

No foreman in the woods ever worked men harder than did Sol Carnahan, yet he won and held the admiration of them all. During the drive, he arose at three in the morning and rousted out his help. Sol’s men complained that they never saw daylight. One fellow claimed that when he went to bed he hung up his pants on the bedpost and they were still swinging when Sol woke him in the morning.

The men worked hard for Sol, for he paid better wages than did most jobbers, and food was plentiful. When the drive neared Northwood, Will Light used to come over from his hotel with steaming food which he served right on the shore of the creek. It is said that one hungry riverjack, smelling the food, forgot to ride the logs, but merely dove in and swam across the icy creek.

Sol also knew how to relax with his men. Trume Brown, who worked for Sol as a young lad and for years afterward, used to say that Carnahan was a bad actor when in the cups. Sol didn’t get disagreeable, but he let himself go with such wild abandon that he was the scourge of hotel keepers from Utica to Piseco, though they tolerated his shenanigans because he was such a good spender. On one occasion, when he and his jacks were drinking at the Bucket of Blood in Utica, Sol asked the proprietor casually, “What will you take for your damned bar, just for an hour?”

The canny proprietor set the price at five hundred dollars, whereupon Sol produced a roll of greenbacks that would have choked a cow, peeled off five hundred-dollar bills, and tossed them on the bar. Again, at the Mansion House, Sol spotted a piano and felt in the mood for singing shanties. Since neither he nor any of his men could play, he jumped up on the piano and pounded the keys with his boots, all the while roaring, “The Jam on Garry’s Rock.” When the hotel man protested that Sol had wrecked the piano, which was true, Sol sent his men to a music store and bought a new one. The proprietor tried to remove the old, battered instrument, but Sol cried, “That’s mine,” and continued to play with his feet and sing shanties until he almost dropped from exhaustion.

Sol’s most dramatic exploit occurred in Foote’s Hotel in Piseco, where lumberjacks were celebrating the culmination of a successful drive. Everyone seemed to be there but Sol, and the party was getting duller by the minute. Suddenly, without warning, the door burst open and Sol rode in on horseback, pranced up to the bar, and had his drinks while the bartender patted the horse’s nose.

Though Sol “palled around” with his men, he stood for no foolishness from them while on the job. If the creek was ready for the drive, he would send word to the Utica hotels that he would meet his men at Prospect station with buckboards at a certain time. The men always showed up so that Bill Hughes and Morey Platt could drive them from the station to the woods.

Tote-drivers were sent out frequently for supplies, and Jack Roberts, a burly fellow, usually got the assignment. Trume Brown used to tell how he and three other young fellows were delegated to go with Roberts to pick up a load of supplies which included a barrel of whiskey. On the way back, the men thought it would do no harm to tap the barrel and have a little drink. The pleasure proved so habit-forming that they lost all sense of time and direction. Three days later, they appeared at Sol’s camp, minus most of the whiskey. Sol resorted to quick justice.
Inasmuch as the barrel of whiskey had cost $125, he took $25 from the wages of each of the five men, amounts that constituted a whole month’s earnings.

Sol fitted in well with the locals around Wilmurt, where he ran a store. At a donation for the minister held in the Eureka House, he donned a white apron and served the guests. Folks up that way say no waiter at the Waldorf-Astoria could have done a better job than the river boss did on that occasion.
Sol’s younger brothers, Adam, commonly called Ab, then about twenty years old, and Erv, a year or so younger, joined Sol in Wilmurt, and their coming did much to settle his early discontent. They worked with Sol on drives and gave promise of developing into superior riverjacks. Ab, in particular, was becoming the best riverman who ever looked at the creek. Erv would have made better progress if he could have stayed away from the liquor. He kept a bottle under his bed and would start each day by taking a big swig of whiskey and eat his breakfast for a chaser.

To be continued.

Look for Part 2 in the next issue.

A Look Back In Time – Thrilling Rescues

September 8, 2023September 8, 2023 Lucinda

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.

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

BY HOWARD THOMAS

River Drivers — The right shoes and a lot of skill make this dangerous work look possibly easy and exciting to crowds who watched from shore. The truth was river drivers rode with death.

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.

Caulked Boots — Calked boots were essential footwear to river drivers.

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.

An Adirondack Lumber Man: Part 2

July 25, 2023July 25, 2023 Lucinda

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.

PHOTOS COURTESY INDIAN LAKE MUSEUM Winter work in the logging woods. Indian Lake has seen its share of loggers and city sportsmen and women.

“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.

PHOTOS COURTESY INDIAN LAKE MUSEUM A proud sportsman leaves Indian Lake village.

“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.

PHOTOS COURTESY INDIAN LAKE MUSEUM Ted Aber was a journalist, public relations director as well as researcher and writer of local history. His efforts saved stories that otherwise would have eventually faded from memory just as the various modes of transportation have come and gone.

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.

An Adirondack Lumber Man: Part 1

June 9, 2023July 25, 2023 Lucinda

BY TED ABER AND STELLA KING

The following is Part 1 of a story by Ted Aber and Stella King that first appeared in Tales From an Adirondack County (Prospect Books, 1981). It 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 first-person history has been documented. —William J. O’Hern

Spring log drives were once common sights throughout the Adirondack Mountains. Today they live on safely preserved in Indian Lake’s museum.

Into the small hotel in a village in St. Lawrence County walked a short, unprepossessing-looking man. Lifting his unshaven face to the desk clerk, he asked for a room for the night.

Quickly, the clerk surveyed the undesirable – his unbuckled overshoes, unkempt woodsmen’s clothing, and the characteristic chew of tobacco that wadded his cheek. The hotelman was sorry; there wasn’t a room in the house.

Wordlessly, the small man rocked back on his heels while reaching into his pocket and drawing out a roll of bills that obviously totaled into the thousands. Thoughtfully, he thumbed the hundred-dollar notes.

The desk clerk suddenly remembered any one of several accommodations that might be at this honored guest’s disposal. The newly arrived was hurriedly shown to his room. The experience was typical. The man was Lumberman Ernie Brooks from Newton’s Corners, on a horse-buying mission to the northern part of the state.

Ernie, who was born at Indian Lake of Joel and Helen Morehouse Brooks, was a woodsman from the start. In a period when local lumbering was in its heyday in the Adirondacks, Ernie helped to give it dignity and color. He and his brothers, Ed and Clarence, lumbered for years at Indian Lake, Ernie and Ed joining forces to form the Brooks Brothers Lumber Company there. Not content with lumbering alone, Ernie was a hotelman on the side.

Up at Indian Lake, Ernie was married to Myra O’Kane. When she died after bearing him four children, he moved his family down to Newton’s Corners in the Town of Lake Pleasant and later married Nathan and Mary Satterlee Page’s daughter, Nora. Together, they ran the old Brooks Hotel south of the four corners and raised a family of five.

age was once a booming community with numerous hotels.

Ernie’s reputation as a lumberman was a good one. None worked his men harder. None offered better pay. A man knew, when he signed with Brooks, that he was to maintain an active life throughout the long months in the mountains.

There was a reason. One winter, over on Sacandaga Lake, Ernie misjudged the weather and, before he could get his logs banked, the spring thaw set in. The logs lay on the ground throughout the following summer and the family lacked the income that was so badly needed. It was a bitter lesson that Ernie never forgot. After that, he worked himself and his men with fury to be sure always to make the drive on time.

Selah Page worked for Ernie in the winter of 1916 at Coon Creek near the third bridge on the road to Wells.
“We used to pull the horses out at 2:00 AM and wouldn’t see camp until dark. I’ll give Ernie credit, though. He was out with the head team and came back with the hind team each day. And he paid good money. But the work was just too hard. I said if I can’t make a living easier than that, I’m going to starve. After that, I did freighting for the camps but never lumbered again.”

One evening, a call came for Dr. Joseph Head to go to the Brooks camp to treat a sick lumberjack. By the time he had bounced over the rough woods roads to reach his destination, it was the middle of the night. To his amazement, the men were already at breakfast. Ernie himself had appeared at midnight for his morning chow.

“Dr. Head sat relaxing over a cup of strong hot coffee. Nearby sat Jerry Murphy, a rugged lumberjack known for the quality of his work.

“Yes sir, I’m going to quit,” Murphy told the physician. “Ernie promised me a full-time job and we’re sleeping a couple of hours every night. That’s no full-time job. I’m through.”

Each day, the clocks at camp were set a few minutes further ahead, so the men would not complain too bitterly about their early rising hour. One winter night, the men had just completed drawing logs and were wolfing down their evening meal. It was 9 o’clock in the evening but the clock read 12.

Allie O’Kane of Indian Lake sat eating with his boss. “Ernie,” he drawled, “if you don’t change that clock pretty soon, it’s going to be Fourth of July before the snow goes off.”

Ernie could laugh with the others, but his firm discipline never faltered.

Once, while lumbering at Cannon Brook, the lumberman came out of the woods and procured a rooster. It would start crowing daily at 4:00 AM. Ernie called it his alarm clock. Thoroughly annoyed after several days’ repetition of this newly-found reveille, the boys decided that something must be done. The next day, the lifeless rooster hung on the knob of the bunkhouse door. Ernie was silent, but soon returned with a second rooster.

“The one who kills that bird is fired,” he announced.

The rooster remained alive.

Sprinkler sleigh used to harden winter logging roads.

To be continued. Part 2 of this story will be featured in the next issue.

A Look Back In Time

April 13, 2023April 13, 2023 Lucinda

1903 Fish Creek Lumber Camp Murder

Published in “Northern Logger” magazine, April 2023

From Viewpoints, “Letters to the Editor,” Hamilton County News, July 1, 1987. From the time the first double-bitted axe bit into a tree to the final river log drive, the century-and-a-half period brought lumber camps to house lumberjacks scattered all over the Adirondack North Country and Tug Hill. Just how many camps there were and their exact locations would probably be only a guess, but the number would easily run in the hundreds.

PHOTO COURTESY EDWARD BLANKMAN (THE LLOYD BLANKMAN COLLECTION

Bert Conklin at the top of his game.

I have bushwhacked high into Cold River country’s Ouluska Pass in the northern Adirondacks hoping to find some remains of a lumber camp Dick Wood and EJ Dailey spoke about during their late 1910s and early 1920s fur-trapping days in Cold River country. The duo spoke about the remains of a small chopper’s shanty in the shadow of Seymour Mountain. A female cook had reportedly died of mysterious circumstances according to the reports learned from men at Lumber Camp 4, a site now occupied by a lean-to approximately a mile beyond Ward Brook lean-to.

At one time there had been a rough tote connection between Camp 4 and Ouluska Pass, but today the terrain between the two points makes for a challenging bushwhack.

Careful investigation today can still reveal leftovers from former lumber camps. Searches generally turn up old bottles – usually liniment, whiskey, and medicine – as well as all types of metal objects. A good many of the old camp clearings and sites I have found have been dug up by bottle collectors and those looking for interesting things from the old logging days.

Cold River lumber enthusiast and historian, Sharp Swan, has spent years combing the High Peaks between Seward, Donaldson, Emmons, and Couchsachraga mountains. His investigations have resulted in a considerable wealth of history of the old logging days in that far-off section. But his hobby, as with other searchers, more than likely has not turned up a majority of the locations of former camps. Evidence of early camps has become harder to find over the passage of time. Once grassy areas, the camp clearings first filled with brambles and pioneer tree species, then by an overgrowth of forest that has completely hidden the sites. Sometimes the bottoms of foundations are spotted where buildings were banked with earth, and the trenches where the banking was dug along the sides of the buildings are often the most evident signs that a camp was there. Even rarer are the remains of an old root cellar.

I find the best stories of old pulpwood camps come from the memories of old-timers. Folklorist and writer Helen Escha Tyler told of a fascinating 1918 pulp job on the slopes of Whiteface Mountain in her Mountain Memories (1974). She based the story in part on an interview with Asa Lawrence of Wilmington, NY. Former Hamilton County historian Ted Aber’s books are also good resources of collected stories and tales.
This memory of B. Harold Chartock of Wilmurt, NY, is an example of a true event that was never documented by Dr. Eliza Jane, the current Hamilton County historian. Like so many logging camps, this camp and everything Mr. Chartock describes exists solely in the following letter he wrote to the Hamilton County News, which published it July 1, 1987.

Photo courtesy DICK WOODS

Abandoned lumber camps made ideal ready-made shelter for sportsmen.

Dear Chris:
The Fish Lumber Camp was located on the northeast corner of Round Pond, which is west of King’s Flow about a mile.

One morning Mr. MacKenzie, a lumber-jack from this camp, after crossing the upper Round Pond Brook walking on the Pine Peak Brook-Tannery Bark Road, was entering an old logging field when another lumberjack from the same camp came up behind him and suddenly struck him with a heavy rusty iron wagon bolen in the back of the head, smashing a hole in MacKenzie’s skull.

The killer then dragged the dead body way out on a peninsula that protrudes out into the southern end of Round Pond. He hid dead MacKenzie in a dense spruce and hemlock thicket, surrounded by towering white pines.

This murder occurred in October 1903. About a month later in November, two more lumberjacks from the same camp, one of them George Hutchins of Indian Lake, found MacKenzie’s body. It was badly decayed.
With a shoulder pole, they carried him out to the end of the peninsula and dug a hole, buried him and gathered rocks scattered in the woods, and then heaped up a pile of rocks marking his grave.

Others in this camp noticed after these two lumberjacks came up missing that all of MacKenzie’s belongings remained untouched, but the other missing lumberjack’s things were gone, including a ragged old blanket that belonged to Lowell Fish. MacKenzie’s murderer gathered his belongings, his rifle, and Fish’s blanket then took the Kunjamuk road going around the west side of Round Pond, walked to Speculator, Lake Pleasant, Piseco Lake, Hoffmeister, Morehouse, and Nobleboro. Then he took the West Canada Creek wagon road up to Honnedaga Lake and a foot trail bearing west to a small settlement on North Lake, where he asked for a job.

He was told the Conklin Logging Camp up in the Town of Webb. He arrived there the next day and got hired by Burt as a log cutter to work in his chain of lumber clearings from October 1903 to May 1904.

Burton Conklin noticed that this new guy worked well, didn’t brawl, drink, or court women, and he hid, so none of the visitors to the camp ever saw him. It was in May 1904 that he got the rest of his pay from Burt, which was $5 per week plus food and lodging, but didn’t say he was quitting.

Burt watched him, and later spotted him removing a ragged old blanket from a hollow tree. He got his rifle out, cleaned grease off the metal parts, polished up the woodwork and left the blanket laying on the ground, took his rifle and bundle of stuff, then walked off into the woods never to be seen again by Burt.

It was sometime later that Burt realized this guy’s peculiar behavior was that of a murderer. He notified the sheriff and deputies, and they traced MacKenzie’s murderer to a train station in Utica, where he bought a ticket. State and federal detectives took over and the manhunt was on. They lost his trail after he got off a train out in the state of Colorado. Burt Conklin never heard of Fish’s Camp, nor the MacKenzie murder. He died in 1947, age 84. The MacKenzie murderer left the “Adirondack Rocks” for the “Big West.”

My great-grandfather worked in the Crotched Pond woods back in the early days before moving to Pennsylvania to work with his cousin in leather processing. This murder took place between the existence of New York State Troopers.

They were established in 1860, served just in the cities, got abolished in 1865, and re-established in 1917 to serve only in the countryside. So, 1987 is the 75th anniversary of the New York State Police. Pennsylvania State Troopers were established only once, and that was in 1905, so 1987 is their 82nd anniversary.

The police thought they were after the September 1903 murderer of Mr. Dexter of Franklin County. The two murders are unrelated. The MacKenzie murder of Hamilton County is not a story; it really took place.
—B. HAROLD CHARTOCK, WILMURT, NY

This old newspaper article is fascinating and seems to have all the elements of a good mystery novel set in a lumber camp at the turn of the 20th century. No other mention of this camp has surfaced during the research I’ve done. It’s strange to think of all the buildings and people who have basically vanished from the Adirondack landscape – just like the MacKenzie murderer did, only more slowly and with only Mother Nature to guide the changes.

A Look Back In Time – The Felling Season

December 7, 2022December 7, 2022 Lucinda

In the spring of 1917, about 60 camps operated in Reverend Frank A. Reed’s area.

The reverend (center) spending time with a camp’s superintendent and clerk. PHOTOS COURTESY TOWN OF WEBB HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

Rev. Reed reported the total Adirondack region had about 150 camps with more than 7,000 men employed.

An article printed in “The Northern Logger “, December 2022

In the spring of 1917, about 60 camps operated in Reverend Frank A. Reed’s area. Spruce was the major wood used in the manufacturing of paper at the time. Some balsam fir and hemlock could be used in the process. The trees could be felled during the period of sap flow from about May 15 to August 15. With approximately 3,000 men employed, the felling was done by two men with a cross-cut saw. They trimmed and peeled the trees and left them on the ground for skidding later in the season.

What follows is one of Rev. Reed’s earliest memories of his long ministerial career.

I decided to start my camp visitation programs as soon as the felling season started in the camps. My first trip to the Gould Paper Company camps led up the south branch of the Moose River. The first stop was a camp operated by Henry Hoe of Moose River on the north side of the river and about 15 miles from McKeever. James Canan had two big camps a little farther up the south side of the river with Joe Gordon and a man named Gardiner as the foreman.

Mr. and Mrs. Louis Holland of Lowville and Ed Wheeler were the cooks in these camps. Clinton and Walter Thompson of Beaver River had a sub job for James Canan near Stink Lake Mountain, and their mother was the cook in their camp.

I went from their camp to visit two camps on North Lake run by Doug Purcell and Frank Murphy for the Gould Paper Company. There I also met Rev. Byron-Curtiss, who lived at North Lake and ran the supply boat with a partner. He was the author of the well-known book The Life and Adventures of Nat Foster: Trapper and Hunter of the Adirondacks.

From there, I hiked from North Lake to Rock Dam on the Moose River and cross the river to the camp of Lewis Joslin and Ward King; both of them lived in Boonville. I found the men hospitable and friendly on these visits and attentive at the worship service held in the bunkhouses. I found that my pack was not big enough for traveling items and a supply of New Testament gospels for the men. Magazines for the men could be sent in with the tote teams.

From Lewis Joslin’s camp on the Red River, I hiked on the dirt road to Limekiln Lake and then on the highway to Inlet. This trip had been a hike of about 100 miles through the woods from McKeever.

Barnes and McGuire of Boonville had a good-sized crew of lumberjacks, mostly from the Black River area housed in a house in Inlet. They were cutting spruce around Eagle Bay. Ezra Barnes was in charge of the operation on this job, Mrs. Barnes was the cook, and their daughter Harriett was her assistant.

The Clearwater (a steamer that ran from the head of Fourth Lake to Old Forge) hadn’t started running on the Fulton Chain lakes yet, so I hiked from Inlet to Fulton Chain (now Thendara) on the dirt road (now Route 28). A man overtook me by automobile and asked me if I wanted a ride. He turned out to be a wholesale grocery man from Corning, New York which was 12 miles from my old home. Reed’s remembrance of his first experience after joining the staff of the Adirondack Lumber Camp Parish in the fall of 1916 is a modest account of a journey by foot through the heavily forested central Adirondack region. Today’s loggers who are familiar with the young reverend’s route know the severe conditions he must have endured to bring the Gospel to the lumber camps.

In 1917, McKeever was a thriving village with a pulp mill operated by the Iroquois Paper Company and a hardwood sawmill. “Former (New York State) Governor John A. Dix was active in the leadership of both mills,” Reed remembered. He often said, “McKeever was an excellent place for on-the-spot training.”

William J. O’Hern is the author of several books on the history of logging in the Adirondacks and Rev. Frank A. Reed, including Adirondack Logging: Life and Times in the Early Years of Logging’s Mechanization.

*Rev. Reed was often seen walking to and from school, preparing him for covering miles and miles of Adirondack trails and roads.*

*Rev. Reed at Camp 7, Ice Cave Mountain, conducting a religious service.*

A Look Back In Time – Adirondack Logger Rescues an Iconic Hermit’s Cabin

November 4, 2022November 4, 2022 Lucinda

Logger Harvey Carr thought to save Adirondack hermit Noah John Rondeau’s cabin from the bulldozer.

An article printed in “The Northern Logger “, November 2022

Noah John Rondeau was a hermit who lived alone in the woods of the Cold River basin in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. There he built his own hermitage and lived for 30 years in two small cabins and some wigwams. He had decided to become a hermit, he said, to escape “the slavery of industrialism.” After a windstorm wrecked his camp in 1950, Rondeau moved out of the woods and spent the last 17 years of his life living as a boarder.

When the abandoned residence was about to be bulldozed in 1959 to complete a contract cutting, local logger Harvey Carr thought it was a shame that this piece of Rondeau’s life would be destroyed. With some help from Eleanor and Monty Webb, owners of The Cliff Hanger Resort in Blue Mountain Lake, along with renewed interest in the hermit’s life from the media, the curator of Adirondack Museum (now known as The Adirondack Experience), Dr. Bruce Inverarity, became convinced that a remaining cabin was worth saving. He granted Carr permission to transport it to the museum’s grounds.

The cabin was made of notched hemlock logs with a bark-covered roof and had a built-in log bunk and stove.

As Eleanor Webb recalls, as soon as permission from Inverarity was granted, Carr took on the arduous job of moving the cabin to the museum. “He painstakingly numbered each log, each board, and each item, carefully dismantled it all, and prepared it for travel the long way out over the rough logging road. He was almost defeated trying to get some help and some way of transportation out [to the museum]. I think one man [Paul Crofut] helped him after he had gotten the consent of the museum to send a truck. Then Harvey put it all carefully together again on the farthest-out perimeter of the grounds.” Later on, the cabin was moved to an indoor exhibit.

In March of 1991, Harvey Carr told me about how Rondeau’s cabin was brought out of the woods and became part of the Adirondack Museum’s collection:

We [the logging crew] went into Cold River in the fall of 1958. I was working for Paul Crofut, the logging contractor, who was working for the Northern Lumber Company. The US Bobbin and Shuttle Company owned the property – they’re the company that made wooden spools and such.

We stayed in there during the winter at the lumber camp. We cut the hardwood and brought it out and sometime during the late winter or going toward spring, somebody from the US Shuttle and Bobbin Company came into camp and told us, before we got down toward Rondeau’s camp, they wanted us to take the dozer down, smash it up, bury it and get rid of all the lumber and everything because they were afraid of hunters moving in and causing a forest fire. Of course, that wasn’t a bad idea, but you know, there was brush and weeds and a lot of slash… Anyway, they wanted us to destroy it completely.

I sat there in the logging camp that night and said to the boys, ‘I hate to see it go…Gee, it’s too bad. It should be in a museum or something.’ Then I hadn’t even thought about it for two, three, four days and then I got to talking about it again. You know, like it would be a shame to tear it all apart, bury it and everything. And about then, Jack Swancott, one of the truck drivers, gave me the idea. Real casual like he says, ‘Well you got a museum right there in Blue Mountain Lake.’

I said, ‘Oh yeah, but I don’t know if they’d be at all interested or not. Naw, I doubt they’d want it.’
Jacky said, ‘Well maybe they would.’

‘Course we stayed in there [at the lumber camp] all week and it would come and go on my mind. So…I stopped up there [at the museum]. Oh, it was late January or February ’59.

I mentioned how I felt to Monty and Eleanor [Webb]. They liked that sort of thing – old stuff, antiques and all. I also went up there [to the museum] and stopped to talk to Ralph Raymond. Ralph was the custodian up there. He lives up there year-round and takes care of the place. I explained all about Rondeau’s camp and so forth but he didn’t get too enthused about it. He didn’t know much about it, but I remember Ralph saying to me, ‘You ought to talk to Dr. Inverarity.’

Sometime soon afterward I told Eleanor and Monty about the old hermit camp, and later I took them into Cold River. We drove up in my truck. We stopped at the lumber camp, ate lunch…[and talked about Rondeau]. Monty said they’d talk to Dr. Inverarity. It wasn’t long after Monty, Eleanor, Mary [Carr’s wife] and I had returned home from Cold River that we were sitting eating supper, and right along I got a telephone call from the operator saying this was a person-to-person call from Dr. Inverarity in New York City. He had heard from Ralph and the Webbs. He said, ‘I hear there is a possibility that we could get Noah John Rondeau’s camp. By all means, we’d like it if you can get it out.’

He even talked of sending a helicopter crew up there with some carpenters who could build a framework around it and airlift it from there to the museum. Knowing the camp’s condition and the woods and so on, I knew what I wanted to do. You know they were even going to send a television crew and all that stuff and it was going to be getting late [in the season]…

I didn’t think Rondeau would care too much about that idea. Of course, he had no legal hold on anything back there anyway, but morally it was still his camp. I told Inverarity that if he wants it, we’ll bring it out. ‘What I’ll do is take it apart piece by piece. I’ll number every part and put it back together exactly the way it was and it will be about the same camp.’

I know when I mentioned it to Dr. Inverarity, he sounded excited, just like a kid after you offer ’em some candy. He was tickled to death.

I’d been a lumberjack, not a carpenter, but I knew I was going to do it my way. So, I brought it out, all by myself along with an old iron stove, some cookin’ kettles, a coffee pot, as well as a hollow stump Rondeau had used as a ‘wet sink’ and the only thing I replaced were the bottom logs.

Of course, it’s all inside [now] under temperature control, and its good I suppose for at least for 150 years.

As for Rondeau, nothing ever pleased him as completely or humbled him as sincerely as being honored by the Adirondack Museum’s Cold River hermit exhibit. That seems clear in this letter to Dr. C.V. Latimer Sr.: “Yes, my Cold River City, is a shrine at Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain and I am more proud of it than I would be of all the shrines of Traitorous H.S.T. [President Harry S. Truman] and Dexter White on top of it.” Now, more than half a century after logger Carr’s effort to preserve what he felt needed protecting, Rondeau’s exhibit has continued to intrigue museum visitors. Thanks to an Adirondack logger, people can still learn about the Adirondack hermit.

*Paul Crofut and Harvey Carr loading salvaged timber near Cold River.*

*left to right: Eleanor Webb, Monty Webb, Mary Carr inside the cabin.*

*The original museum display was outside.*

A Look Back In Time – Mary Andreason, Pioneer, Lumberjill and Wolf Shooter

October 7, 2022October 7, 2022 Lucinda

The wolf-shooting logger-woman Mary Andreason’s story was one of safety, forestry, and the economic and social life of America.

*A typical day’s work. Mary’s family enjoyed good times and faced hardships. Photo COURTESY JOHN DONAHUE*

A Look Back In Time

Mary Andreason, Pioneer, Lumberjill and Wolf Shooter

An article printed in “The Northern Logger “, October 2022

Among the logging-related articles to appear in the March 1952 issue of The Lumber Camp News was “Pioneer Woman Shot Wolves, Worked at Logging.” Frank A. Reed, senior editor-publisher, wrote that the story first “appeared in the November 17, 1897, Potter County Journal.” The catchy title was sure to attract the attention of the magazine’s readers. Reed said, it “paints a picture of the early days along Kettle Creek” and tells about the pluck and courage it took for a woman to live on the frontier.

This old-time story, set in the woods of Pennsylvania, is characteristic of the breadth of material that appeared in Rev. Reed’s logging publication, along with articles about lumbering operations, used and new machinery and equipment for sale, and reprints from logging and farming periodicals such as Maine’s Portland Press Herald, Heard’s Dairyman, Pennsylvania Forests and Waters, and the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association. For example, “Old Timers’ Notes” profiled older logging jobbers, and there were informational columns by writers from Tennessee, Wisconsin, Michigan, California, and various forestry colleges around the country.

In addition to his recapturing the then 55-year-old event, the editor made an announcement that by the July 1952 edition, the magazine would appear under its new name, The Northeastern Logger. This was an exciting time for Reed, who almost single-handedly began The Lumber Camp News in 1939. He announced that there would be a staff of eight people from various parts of the Northeast who would carry on the program of publishing and that the editorial office would remain in Old Forge, NY. The magazine’s name change was made so it could more completely cover the broader scope of material and service. Retired editor Thomas C. O’Donnell offered changes to improve the appearance and layout.

The wolf-shooting logger-woman story was perhaps included because of a new thrust to include a wide range of news coverage such as safety, forestry, the economic and social life of America, fire control, logging operations, education, a Christian column call the “Sky Pilot Page” and what became a popular “Adventures of Uncle Hatchet” tall tale column, to name a few.

The woman is Mrs. Mary Andreason, and she is the widow of the former secretary to the famous Ole Bull, a Norwegian who formed the colony of Oleona in Potter County, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Andreason (then Mrs. French) was a widow when Andreason met her. But don’t picture a genteel and soft-spoken lass who stayed home cooking, sewing, and spinning when you think of Mary French Andreason.

She was first married to a settler and trapper named French when Potter County was pure wilderness. Today she says her bones ache with rheumatism, perhaps due to the physical demands of her early pioneer experiences. She hunted and trapped at her first husband’s side. It is said that during one winter, Mrs. French, unaided, trapped 65 gray wolves, knocking them in the head with a hatchet that she always carried on a belt around her waist.

Along with hunting and trapping, Mrs. French is notable because she went with her husband and a crew of men to drive logs on Kettle Creek. With pike pole or canthook, this powerful woman waded the streams with the men, whirling a derelict log into the stream or breaking a jam at the creek’s bend.

Driving logs is so dangerous a business that plenty of men won’t risk it, yet Mrs. French took on the job more than one spring, and earned from six to eight dollars a day. Even now, at 85, she mentions with considerable pride the time when she was young and strong enough to pitch logs in Kettle Creek. Mrs. French was widowed in 1850, and was still quite young when 74 Ole Bull, a Norwegian violinist, declared to several hundred hopeful immigrants, “We are to found a New Norway, consecrated to liberty, baptized with independence and protected by the Union’s mighty flag.” Ole Bull and his followers came to Potter County and took up a 12,000-acre tract.

The arrival of the Norwegians made life a bit easier for Mrs. French. She was soon employed as a cook at the Norwegian headquarters, where she met and married Henry Andreason, one of Ole Bull’s immigrants who had come along to manage the affairs of the Oleana colony.

Despite the easier life, Mrs. Andreason was not crazy about the colonists. She says they danced and carried on “too high” for her. Often the Norwegians would dance all night to the tune of a squeaky fiddle when they should have been resting for their next day’s work, clearing new ground for their little farms.

Mrs. Andreason says the best and most exciting time of her life was the first years she lived in Potter County. There were unimaginably large herds of deer and elk; panthers prowled and growled and wolves filled the night with their howls.

Mrs. Andreason was an expert rifle shot and had slain scores of black bears, wildcats and deer. She specialized in wolves, however, because the bounty was large enough to make it profitable to hunt them.

Mrs. Andreason was once delayed when she was heading home on a footpath along Kettle Creek. It grew dark. She heard wolves approaching. She says she figured they were on her trail, so she strapped her rifle to her back and climbed a hemlock tree, knowing that if she could get a dozen feet above ground she would be safe from the wolves’ sharp teeth and claws.

Later in life, Mary Andreason enjoyed sharing her hardscrabble life on the frontier. In less than ten minutes the pack of wolves surrounded the tree where she had taken refuge. She could see their eyes shimmering in the darkness; she shot them one by one as fast as she could reload.

She wasn’t far from home, and the sound of the repeated rifle shots soon brought her husband. He came bearing a rifle in one hand and a flaming torch in the other. The fire frightened away the few remaining wolves.

Mrs. Andreason gathered up the dead wolves at the foot of the tree – not as a souvenir of her experience, but as a reward for her night’s work.

After her husband died, Mrs. Andreason continued to live with her son on a small farm in Potter Colony.

Lumbermen and women were colorful characters, and they enjoyed remembering one another in the often exaggerated tales they recounted, but Mary Andreason’s tale needs no embroidering. These were the kind of memories Frank A. Reed kept alive during the years he ministered to the ‘jacks who lived in the lumber camps – camps he often walked many miles through deep, trackless forests to reach. It is to Reed’s credit that they live on to this day in The Northern Logger’s archives in Old Forge, NY.