Hello viewers: We have just received a wonderful story from a man who saw our website and sent us so much interesting information. He gave us permission to publish his memories and we found nice pictures to go with the story...here goes
Dear Ms. Richter and Students,
Thank you for sending a copy of the "Last Kennebec Log Drive" DVD,
I love it and play it often. Although I did not work on river drives
I have worked in the woods enough to understand how the guys felt about
the drive. Thanks also for asking about my experience. I am
now age 73 and will tell you a few things that impressed me enough to stick
in my memory for more than half a century.
My Dad started working in the woods in 1907 and for much of the time until
1967 he owned and operated portable sawmills. So I grew up around
lumbering operations and have seen many changes in the ways things are
done. He cut a woodlot in about 1918 that is located along the Kennebec
in Concord Township maybe a little more than half way from Solon to Bingham. In
those days everything was done with hand tools and horses, no chainsaws,
skidders, tractors, etc. It was axes, bucksaws, 1 & 2 man crosscut
saws and so forth. Only marketable wood was cut, no clearcutting
and the horses did not damage the small growth as do todays skidders and
other heavy equipment. So, by about 1955 nature had taken its course
and the lot was ready to harvest some timber again and I decided to have
a go at it. We had rarely checked on the lot over the years as it
was quite a drive from here in southern NH. In those days neither
roads nor vehicles were built for the speeds that we drive today.
I built an 8ft. x 12 ft. camp, sturdy but rough, that would fit on
our lumber truck, loaded in a few supplies and headed for Maine one Saturday
morning in fall of 1955 I think. My father followed in our old chrysler
family car to leave with me and he would return home with the truck. A
few weeks before I had slept in the car at the lot a night or two and stayed
at the hotel in Solon 
one
night and scouted the area to see where I could sell pulp, birch, and pine
sawlogs. There was a sawmill in Bingham
run by a man named Glen Wing that agreed to buy the sawlogs. He invited
me, a stranger, to stay at his house. I chose not to and mention
it only as an example of how friendly the people in the area were. There
was a small factory in Solon that used short birch logs to make wood sticks
like used for popsicles, stiring, wood forks, etc. The logs were
put on a machine that spun them at high speed and a sharp blade about
4 feet wide peeled off a continuous thin sheet of wood from which product
was stamped out, all in one operation if I recall correctly. 
They
were running two or three shifts a day and the product came off the machines
so fast that I was surpised that they didn't make enough product in a week
to supply the whole world. So much for my ability to think big! My
camp was nothing fancy, a door in one end, a small window each side, a
single spring and mattress at the back, a small table hinged on the wall
to fold down for eating and one hand made bench and an old chair to sit
on. For heat I had a tin airtight stove of the type sold in most
hardware stores at the time. Being tin it would heat up and cool
down fast but was not intended for cooking. I didn't know much about
cooking anyway but managed to boil water for coffee, fry eggs, meat,potatoes
and heat up canned vegetables on the stove. Once in a while I would
drive up to Bingham and eat at a restaurant, the only one in town at the
time if I remember right. On cold nights, which was most of the time,
I would crumple up newspaper with some very dry pine sticks or birch bark
and have it ready to drop right into the stove come morning. Then
I would get as strong a fire going as I dared and go to bed. 
In
my ignorance of construction I did not put tarpaper or anything under the
shingles I used for siding and that combined with cracks around the old
door made for a mighty drafty camp if there was a wind. A lesson
learned that I did not forget. Anyway, I would get up well before
dawn, pop the papers and kindling in the now ice cold stove and ignite
it as fast as I could with a wood match. I bet I was the fastest
fire starter in Maine.
Chainsaws had fairly recently been improved to the point where one man
saws were light enough and efficient enough to outperform handsaws which
soon became obsolete. To get started I found a tool supply store
in a nearby town ( maybe Skowhegan ) and bought a chainsaw, an axe, a pulp
hook and a peavey. This investment took most of my money. I
felt like a kid with a new bike with that shiny new red chainsaw although
I had never even touched one before. My idea was to hire an experienced
chopper ( this is what guys who felled, limbed and cut trees to standard
lengths were called ) to help me. And strange as it seems, on my
first or near first night at camp a hunter walked out of the woods just
behind my camp where I was cutting firewood and learning about my new saw,
the only person that I saw walking in the area the entire few months that
I was there. He lived in Bingham and was going to walk home. It
was getting dark so I offered to drive him home and he accepted. I
learned that his name was Joe, illiterate, French, in his early 60's, and
a chopper with chainsaw experience who had been clearing power lines in
Connecticut. Luck, coincidence, divine guidence,who knows, my ideal
chopper had walked right to my door! Before he left my car I had
hired him at 1.50 per hour ( actually not too bad a wage for the time and
place ) and I would drive him back and forth to work..
Choppers were often paid according to volume cut, called "by the cord" or "by
the thousand" ( board feet of sawlogs ) and since Joe was going to
be paid by the hour I figured I ought to keep an eye on him to be sure
he did a good days work. Also, most choppers that I had known were
French, and many were dishonest and therefore I thought that no French
people could be trusted. Well, Joe turned out to be a good worker
and a decent guy so fortunately I lost my prejudice at a fairly young age. We
sometimes worked together for hours without saying a word but I learned
a lot about chopping by watching how Joe did it. He willingly answered
my questions if asked and occasionally offered advice. Usually we
did not take breaks other than noon for lunch. I'm quite sure that
there was no law mandating breaks at that time. We worked 7am to
4pm with one hour lunch as I recall. We walked back to camp
for lunch at noon where we made coffee and sharpened our tools with a file
as needed. Joe and I both used my tools and I think it was our first
lunch at camp when he said, "Dat axe too tik" and proceeded to
file it well back from the bit ( cutting edge ). After that it cut
much better and all along I had no idea that a new axe would not be the
right thickness. Even though Joe could neither read nor write ( he
signed with an X in my payroll book ) he somehow could estimate pretty
close how much wood that we cut in a day.
After we had a good amount of pulp and sawlogs cut I started asking about
hiring someone with horses to yard the wood out and someone with
a truck to haul it to the mills. I don't think it occurred to me
to try to sell it on the river bank but I probably did not have enough
volume to interest anyone in that anyway. The Kennebec flowed past
the lot maybe a quarter mile or so from my camp and usually I did not hear
it. Sometimes, usually at night, I would hear a crashin' and boomin'
coming from the river. To me it was kind of a powerful pleasant sound
and I thought that maybe the gates at the Wyman Dam were opened and the
noise was pulp or large ice chunks hitting together in the rushing water. 
There
were no houses in the area and only an occasional car would go by in the
daytime and usually none at night so most of the time I heard only sounds
of nature. I guess that jobs were not too plentiful as I soon
found a man named Earl in Solon who had both a team and a truck. Earl
was also a hardworking decent guy, about 35 years old, and we worked well
together. His truck was much smaller than typical logging trucks
you see today but no matter, we had to load and unload it by hand which
would be nearly impossible with one of those big rigs. Earl's truck
was an open back platform body type such as I was accustomed to. The
first morning that he arrived on the job the horses were standing on the
back with blankets on but their faces must have been cold from riding in
the open.
I said to Earl, "How do you take them off, where is the ramp?" "I
jump 'em on and off", he replied. And that team jumped off the
truck mornings and on at night for the entire few months that they worked
with me. There was a slight slope to the land and that helped some
but sometimes they needed two or three trys to make the jump on. I
had hauled horses before but always had a heavy wood ramp to walk them
on and off the truck. So this was another new experience for me. There
were a number of differences between logging practices in that part of
Maine and where I lived in NH. I was accustomed to not working rainy
or snowy days, too dangerous they said. 
The first day it rained
I found that it made no difference in Maine. When it snowed we didn't
chop and I was told that was because when you hit a tree with an axe the
snow falls off branches and down your neck. Yarding and trucking
we sometimes kept working at in either rain or snow storms.
In NH the usual technique was to cut logs to desired length in the woods
and load them on a heavy wood sled called a scoot or scootsled. Earl
had a double runner type sled with iron clad runners. For sawlogs,
sometimes tree length and sometimes log length, we disconnected the front
runners from the rear and put the front end of the logs on the front set
of runners only and let the rear of the logs drag. The procedure
worked fine but unless there was snow cover the logs picked up dirt which
could dull saw blades at the mills. Probably not a problem nowadays
as the mills usually have log debarkers to clean logs prior to sawing. For
pulp wood we put a couple planks across the two sets of runners and piled
the wood on those in a stack I would guess a lttle under a cord to a load. Then
we unloaded the wood usually right onto the truck, again neatly stacked. Then
we drove to the mill south of Solon but I'm not sure which town and unloaded
the wood by hand. So, that is three handlings of the wood after the
trees are cut. I am not completely familiar with the process today
but I suspect it is fully mechanized, no handling of the wood by people
at all.
There is a little more to the story so I may send another email later.
Thanks for the opportunity to tell my story and good luck to all
of you in your future careers.
Dave Collins
Both of these hooks were used to handle pulp and other short logs typically
48 to 52 inches in length, depending on mill requirements. The top
hook in the photo is commonly called a scratch hook and the bottom one
a pulp hook. Prior to arriving at my lot in Concord, Maine I had
never used or even seen a scratch hook. I had used a pulp hook and
they were widely used in my area.
Note how much smaller and lighter the scratch hook is than the pulp hook. The
pulp hook needs weight at the hook end so when you swing it the tip will
be driven into the wood. Another difference is that the point on
the scratch hook is at a little less of an angle to the wood so if you "scratch" on
the wood it will dig into the bark, no need to drive it in. Also
easier to let go of the wood when you want to. To a guy that handles
hundreds of logs a day it makes a huge difference in how tired he is at
days end and how much he has accomplished.
I watched men using scratch hooks to load birch into railroad boxcars,
in Solon or Bingham I think, and observed how even fairly small men were
doing it very efficiently. They moved wood much easier and faster
then I could have done it with my pulphook. Needless to say I soon
bought a scratch hook and it is the very one shown in the photo. I
painted it white so I could find it on bare ground and red to show up in
snow. Otherwise when you lay it down to do something else then it
wastes a lot of time finding it. Been there done that. Ditto
with axes and peaveys.
I suspect that some clever Maine blacksmith designed the scratch hook.
Reminds
me of the peavey, another ingenious tool designed by Joseph Peavey, an
early Maine Blacksmith. If you haven't heard of him you can Google
him and read the story. You probably know that peaveys are tools
for rolling and otherwise handling logs. What you probably won't
read is what a versatile and useful tool they were to the woodsmen. We
used them to pry as with a crowbar, pound as with a sledge hammer, push
on cut trees to direct their fall and whatever else might come to mind. Scootsleds
had a hole drilled in the front bunk ( a wood beam front and back holding
the two runners together ) to stick a peavey point in. The teamster
would stick his peavey in the hole to carry it and also to hang onto if
he was riding an empty scoot. A good teamster would only ride the
scoot when there was snow cover or otherwise an easy drag for the horses. If
they rode a scoot loaded with logs they would swing the peavey over their
head and drive it into a log to hang onto. Horses get used to repetition
and sometimes the teamster would just tie the reins to the peavey and let
the horses go back to the mill by themselves.
Dave Collins
.