Colonial Era Log Drives Down the Connecticut River

After leaving Cornish, I thought I would go across the river to Vermont. I already featured Windsor in my stories about Simeon Ide, so I googled Hartland, found the Hartland Historical Society website and clicked on “articles”. The first one that came up was a story about a logger, a 19 year old named Charles Barber.

Charles was 19 years old in 1895. He was from Cherryfield Maine, and was a riverman who worked for George Van Dyke, bringing logs down the Connecticut River from the Connecticut Lakes all the way to Mount Tom in Massachusetts. Where the river passes by Hartland, it gets rapid at Sumner Falls. Charles was riding a log when he fell off the log and drowned. His buddies retrieved his body from the water and brought it up onto the riverbank.

The boss was notified and the boss in turn notified Charles' father. Mr. Barber came all the way to Hartland from Cherryfield, Maine, collected the $300 of pay that Charles had coming to him, and whipped away before he could be pressured into taking his son's body home with him. Charles' friends, tough rivermen and loggers though they were, felt so horrified that the boy's father left his

son's body without the benefit of a decent burial, that they buried him along the riverbank with a tombstone. In recent years, the Hartland Historical Society has fenced off the grave and replaced the slab of stone with Charles' name on it with a nicer permanently engraved stone.

This story got me interested in the log drives down the Connecticut River. Connecticut River is the longest river in New England and was the primary mode of transportation for both goods and people for many years after the Upper Valley was first settled. The most important natural resource of Northern New England was its lumber. In the colonial era, the tall, straight pines were especially prized.

The first logs sent downriver in log drives were mast pines destined for the King's Navy. I wrote more about this earlier, but in a nutshell, the main masts of ships were built from one tall, strong tree. These trees no longer existed in England, but there were plenty in the New World, especially in New England. Colonists were not allowed to cut down these trees, either to get them out of the way, or to use them for themselves. Often a representative of the king would go through the forests and mark the biggest, straightest pines, thus reserving them for the king.

Ken Brauner, in his book “Log Drives on the Connecticut River” tells about a couple of Upper Valley settlers who ran afoul of the law when they cut down some of the king's mast pines. In 1769, a man named William Dean from Windsor cut down 16 mast trees. He claimed that he had cut them down to clear a meadow, which was illegal in any case, but the king's agents found some landed on the ice out in the river, in preparation for when the ice broke. Dean was arrested, along with his father and brother, sent to New York City, tried, convicted, and sentenced to four months in prison and fined 800 pounds.

Brauner also writes that, during the winter of 1772, a man named Wheelock from Hanover cut 1500 logs destined to be sold downriver, but before the ice broke, the felled trees were discovered by an agent of the king. In actuality, this was Eleazar Wheelock, the founder of Dartmouth College, and the full story is found in “A History of Dartmouth College and Hanover, New Hampshire”, by Frederick Chase. It seems that when the land was cleared to make what was to be the college green, some of the trees nearest the river were reserved for sale in Springfield (Massachusetts). Again, like in the Dean case, the logs were put out onto the ice of the river awaiting the spring thaw. Chase says, “The logs were marked 'D. C.' but through some oversight the 'broad arrow' was omitted” (In explanation – D.C. stood for Dartmouth College, and the broad arrow was the King's mark). Governor Benning Wentworth, who was usually a strong supporter of Wheelock and the college, was quick to write to Wheelock and advise him that, “I have had many complaints that your mark is used to cover logs in the Connecticut River which were illegally cut, and wish this circumstance would not circumscribe my power to render you services in the future.” Since the people in Springfield had already paid for the logs, Wheelock was in trouble both with the crown and the party in Springfield. Two years later, the case was still in court.

For almost two hundred years, the Connecticut River served as a highway transporting logs from the Canadian border and points South, to lumber yards in Massachusetts. Along the way, lumber barons got rich, and lumber jacks and rivermen earned wages cutting the logs, then making sure they reached their destination downriver. Many rivermen, like Charles Barber, lost their lives. Driving the logs down the river was a dangerous and physically demanding job.