Stories from the River, Death of George Van Dyke

George Van Dyke was the primary lumber baron on the Connecticut River during the Guilded Age. Like many Guilded Age legends, he was a larger than life figure who could be capricious and contradictory, trying to get away with disobeying the law to make a profit, swindling landowners and hired labor one minute, and helping them out the next.

George was a strict taskmaster to his employees. He hired hundreds of workers and knew them all. He never tolerated bad behavior in the towns along the river. If a worker of his was caught vandalizing or stealing he was fired on the spot. He was actively involved in every stage of the logging process. He personally supervised his logging camps, and if a worker overslept, George would go into the bunkhouse bellowing at the top of his lungs and kick the shirker in the ribs.

During log drives, he followed the logs down the river, personally supervising the whole operation, especially in the case of a log jam. He was not afraid to go out on the river, and supervised by leading rather than directing. George was often the first person out in the middle of the jam.

That being said, workers who could read and figure were better off, because George was not above trying to swindle employees out of their pay, and all of his employees wanted to be sure they checked their pay packets. Robert Pike, in his book “Tall Trees, Tough Men”, writes, “That Van Dyke flagrantly cheated his men is a fact; that he yowled like a cut tom cat when he had to spend a few unexpected dollars is a fact, that he ran rough-shod over farmers is true. But it is also true that when a former employee showed up sick and broke in Boston, needing to get back to North Stratford, George would help him.”

George did have his favorite employees, and one of those favorites was Bill James. Bill started working for George when he was 16 years old. When he was an old man, Bill settled in Windsor. He was Windsor's gravedigger, and loved to tell stories about his days logging on the Connecticut, working for George Van Dyke. In 1961, the Valley News published a supplement to the paper commemorating the 200^th anniversary of the Upper Valley. Bill James gave an interview for that publication, about his adventures on the river.

Bill was a stableboy and accompanied the horses all the way from North Stratford to Mount Tom.

His first year, he was paid off at Mount Tom, but still accompanied the horses home to North Stratford. He blew all of his money, $335, and had to borrow the money to get himself back to the lumber camp in the late summer of the next year. Spring found him back with the horses on the trip downriver, but this time, he wasn't paid at Mount Tom. George told him to go north with the horses again, and get his money from the paymaster in North Stratford. When he went to collect, his pay was only $35, and Bill refused to sign the receipt for only part of his pay. The paymaster told him to go see George about the rest. George refused to pay him the full amount he was due, and finally Bill signed the receipt so that he could get at least the $35. George handed him a bankbook with $300 in it and gave him a lecture about saving his money. Bill kept the bankbook, added to it every year, never took any money out of it, and used it to buy rental property in Windsor when he was much older.

Another time, someone sent Bill into the hotel where George was staying, to get him out of bed so that he could catch the train. He found George all ready to go, except that his shoes were untied. George told Bill to tie his shoes, and Bill refused, telling him he was a horseman, not a servant. George fired him on the spot, then ten minutes later asked him why he wasn't hitching up the horses. When Bill said, “You fired me”, George answered, “Aw, never mind that. Go hitch up those horses”.

In “Tall Trees and Tough Men”, Robert Pile retells a story Bill told in the Valley News article. One spring, some young kids were out canoeing in the middle of the log jam and their canoe overturned. A couple of the rivermen rescued them and the boss, Joe Roby, told Bill to take them up to the campfire and get them dried off and fed. Joe read them the riot act about being in a canoe during the log drive and set them on their way. A few weeks after the article was printed in the paper, Bill got a letter from an old man from Bellows Falls, saying that he was one of the boys.

Bill lived a full life. One year he was on the riverbank near Lebanon, working with an old-timer. The water had thrown a group of logs up on the mud and the two were struggling to dig them out and return them to the water. The old-timer decided he had had enough and announced to Bill that he was going to quit. Bill told him if he quit right then he wouldn't get paid. The old-timer quit anyway. Years ent by. Bill and a buddy decided to go “on the bum” to see some of the country. They ended up broke and hungry in Ohio, where they knocked on the door of a prosperous looking farmhouse in search of a meal. They woman who answered the door said she would go get her husband, and maybe he would help them out. Her husband turned out to be the old-timer who had quit that day.

Bill James was still young when George Van Dyke died. In May of 1908, George was hospitalized in three months for “water on the brain”, which, given how tightly wound he was, could have been a stroke. He recovered, but never regained his former health and vitality. After his illness, he bought a red Stevens-Duryea touring car and hired a chauffeur, “Shorty” Hodgdon. Shorty drove him up and down the roads along the Connecticut River, following the log drives.

In 1909, George and Shorty were parked at the edge of a 75 foot riverbank in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, at a spot called Riverside. They watched the men work the logs through the rapids for a while, then George told Shorty to take him back to the hotel they were staying in, the Welden in Greenfield. How it happened remains a mystery, but instead of back up, the car went forward and plunged over the bank. Shorty died immediately and George ended up on the rocks, either having jumped or been ejected from the car. He died later in the Farren Hospital, at age 64. George had never been married and did not have any children,. Jis brothers Thomas and Philo inherited the company.

In 1913, Connecticut River Lumber was sold to a Boston syndicate. Although George's untimely death hastened the demise of the company, CVL lumbermen had pretty much exhausted the supply of lumber in northern New England. Years before his death, George had established railroad lines to the interior of the north country to exploit the forests of Vermont and New Hampshire, after the forests around the Connecticut Lakes had been mostly depleted. The new owners wanted the company not for its timber, but for the water rights. Moody's Manual of Railroads and Corporation Securites listed Connecticut River Lumber as owning 300,000 acres in northern New Hampshire and Vermont. The water rights that went with the land were becoming more and more valuable, to generate electricity.

Even so, there was $2.9 million worth of timber still standing on CVL land, and the company announced that they would hold one final, gigantic log drive in the Spring of 1915. All of the old log hands traveled north to be part of the winter logging operation and spring drive. 500 men were hired to man that final drive. At least two had been present on the very first CVL log drive in 1869, Al Patrick, from Maine, and Rube Leonard, from Colebrook. For almost 50 years, the arrival of the logs was an exciting event for the towns along the river, and as the logs journeyed south, the riverbank was packed with onlookers who knew it was the end of an era.

George Van Dyke's Upper Valley Court Cases

By the last decade of the 19^th century, George Van Dyke was the undisputed lumber king of the Connecticut River. Born into a huge impoverished family in Quebec, Van Dyke combined physical strength, sharp intelligence, and ruthless ambition to make sure he would never experience poverty as an adult. By taking advantage of good business deals, and creating good deals where they weren't any, he made a fortune shipping lumber down the Connecticut River, and used that fortune to gain control of the lumber business through the Connecticut River Lumber Company.

The Connecticut River Lumber Company ran lumber camps at the Connecticut Lakes in northern Vermont and New Hampshire. Lumbermen lived in these camps and cut down timber to move downriver when the spring thaw came. Some of these men were farmers who left their families after the fall harvest, worked for CVL in the winter and then went home for planting season. Some stayed on as log drivers. CVL hired 500-700 crew members at the start of the log drive season. Not all of these men were drivers. Some were support workers – cooks to feed the crew, men to drive and care for the horses, and even bookkeepers to keep track of transactions and handle payday.

The first part of the drive was easy until the logs got past Lancaster, New Hampshire and started down the Fifteen Mile Falls, a series of rapids that lasted about 20 miles. Milliken's Pitch and the Twenty-Seven Islands were the next hazardous spots. Once the logs were past these spots, about half of the crew were let go. Another group left after Woodsville, with the rest continuing until the end. At the southern end of the drive, more logs tended to get washed out of the water and beached on the banks of the river, requiring men to climb up the riverbanks, dig them out of the mud and return them to the water. For a more in depth look at life in the logging camps and on the river, read “Log Drives on the Connecticut River” by Bill Gove. It's a fascinating, detailed and well-written history of logging in northern New England.

CVL did have some impact on people in the Upper Valley. The arrival of the logs every year was a source of entertainment for the inhabitants of the river towns, where there was usually very little excitement. Townspeople could hear the booming and crashing of the logs before the main body of logs came through, and there were also a few logs that arrived ahead of the pack. Spectators flocked to the river to watch the show. The log drivers were a tough, flamboyant bunch, riding the logs, risking their lives to deliver the lumber down river. Their reputation and mystique rivaled that of the cowboys of the same era.

Many of these log drivers had spent all winter in the log camps, and were anxious to get off the river for a few days to experience civilization. When they went into the towns, the excitement was ratcheted up a few notches. Bill Gove describes a scene in Woodsville, when one of the log drivers, Ed Smith, was walking drunkenly down a sidewalk when he spotted a blonde girl inside a store window with nothing on but her stockings. He drove through the showcase window and grabbed her, only to discover that she was a naked mannequin.

George Van Dyke and CVL were involved in several lawsuits in the Upper Valley. In 1891, George brought a suit against the Olcott Falls Company of Olcott Falls. The Olcott Falls Company, also called White River Paper or the Wilder Brothers Mill, was a papermill on the Connecticut River. The mill produced primarily newsprint paper. At its height, the mill ran 24 hours a day, producing 45 tons of wet pulp and using nearly 300 cords of timber a day. Of course, the mill operated on water power provided by the Connecticut River.

Mills that operated by water power diverted the water to turn their water wheels. When the logs arrived at the site of a mill, a conflict ensued between the lumber companies and the mills, if the water flow available in the river channel was insufficient to float the logs. Mills could shut down production and return the water to the river channel for long enough to float the logs by, or the mill managers could refuse to cooperate with the log companies. If the shutdown was going to take a few hours, usually the mills would comply.

The problem was that sometimes the log drives could take days or weeks, especially if there was a log jam. Companies like Olcott Falls employed huge numbers of workers around the clock, and were responsible for producing orders of newspaper print for newspapers from big cities. If production had to be shut down for any length of time, the workers would be without pay and orders of paper would be unfulfilled.

In 1880, the Olcott Falls mill was sold to Herbert and Charles Wilder, of Boston. Charles moved north to personally supervise the expansion of the mill on the Connecticut River. At the year later, when the log drive came through, the mill operators,probably at the direction of Charles Wilder, refused to shut down to let the logs go through. As a result, George took the Olcott Falls Company to court to try to force them to let the logs go down.

The verdict in the case Connecticut River Lumber v Olcott Falls Co was that the paper mill had to allow the logs to pass by, no matter what. The decision of the court was crystal clear. “The canal gate must be open and the demand of the second lumberman is complied with, whether the number of his logs is ten or ten million, whether their passage stops the mill for an hour or a month, and whether the number of mill operators is one or one thousand, the lumberman is entitled to a free way as good as he would have had if no dam had been built.” This ruling was entirely based on the act of incorporation for the Olcott Falls Company in 1807, in which there was a proviso that specifically stated that lumber companies would have the right to freely float logs down the river, forever.

   George Van Dyke
 
 
A court case that George lost involved the destruction of the Windsor Railroad Bridge in 1897. In June, the logs were coming down the river just as a heavy rainstorm caused the river to rise with a rushing current. On the 10^th, a log jam of twelve million board feet covered an area of about six acres around a railroad bridge owned by the Boston and Maine Railroad. It destroyed a pier, and the portion of the bridge supported by that pier. The railroad company sued Connecticut River Lumber, claiming that the company was negligent during the log drive. Although this was inaccurate, the court still ruled that the company was liable for the damage to the river, to the tu ne of $50,000. The logs involved in this particular log jam were owned by the Connecticut River Manufacturing Company, a subsidiary of CRL, but not specifically CVL. George tried to quickly dissolve that corporation during the trial, but that ploy was unsuccessful, and in the end, CRL had to pay the railroad company the whole $50,000.

 

George Van Dyke - Gilded Age New England Lumber Baron

After the end of the Civil War, the United States went on a growth and building spree that demanded huge amounts of lumber. In the west, this lumber came from the upper northwest corner of the country, from Oregon and Washington. In the east, it was shipped down the Connecticut River from Maine and the Connecticut Lakes region, in huge shipments of logs managed by log drivers, who “rode the logs” down the river, risking life and limb to make sure the logs kept moving, breaking up any log jams that occurred along the way. David Sumner, the river’s first log baron, had made a fortune moving logs downriver. He died in 1867, and his enterprises were small compared to the huge companies that dominated the lumber trade during the Gilded Age.

In David Sumner’s time, logs were floated all the way down the Connecticut River from the headwaters near the Canadian border to the mouth of the river into the Atlantic in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. By the late 1800’s, people in Springfield, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut had more leisure time and more money. They enjoyed using the river for recreational boating, forcing lumber companies to process their logs further upriver. As a result, several lumber companies combined resources and started lumber mills in Holyoke and at Mount Tom in Northampton. In a logical sequence of events, these companies merged and became the Connecticut River Lumber Company in 1879.

The Connecticut River Lumber Company was the biggest lumber company that had been seen on the river. David Sumner’s goal in business was to support his family, and he managed to do that in very well, even building a mansion that stands to this day. Sumner’s fortune and his “mansion” were small potatoes compared to the fortunes that the CRL Co amassed in the late 1800’s. Business owners in the Guilded Age weren’t called “robber barons” for nothing. They let nothing stand in their way, and George Scott and Thomas Pearsall of CRL were no exception.

CRL was not, however, the only company driving logs on the river. The Turners Falls Lumber Company and the McIndoe Falls Lumber Company also floated their stock down the Connecticut. The season was too short for log drivers and their bosses to sit around and wait for other log companies to clear the water. When CRL tried to drive out their competition, they found the owner of the McIndoes Falls Company to be extremely stubborn and difficult. In a prime example of cutthroat competition, the story is that George Scott told one of his managers to “go back up there and kill him off”. Apparently the McIndoe Falls guy was too tough even to kill, so the next best thing was to hire him. In 1884, CRL’s general manager retired due to failing eyesight, and the company hired George Van Dyke to replace him.

George Van Dyke was born in 1846, in a log cabin in Quebec. He was the fifth of eight children. His family was poor, and he started working in a lumber camp in Maine at age 14 and by age 19 was managing a crew on the river. Although he did not have much formal education, George had a sharp business mind, a strong will, and a drive to make money fueled by his impoverished childhood. These attributes, with practical experience working with lumber and the powerful physical strength acquired through years of arduous labor, combined to produce the most powerful and aggressive timber baron in New England history.

By 1870, George was working for himself, and bought several sawmills along the Connecticut River. Through business deals and hard work, and probably some underhandedness as well, he began amassing a fortune. Bill Gove, in his book “Log Drives on the Connecticut River” describes one of George’s first business deals. “In 1879, Van Dyke found himself unexpectedly in temporary possession of another sawmill on the river. He made a $100 purchase of a timber lot in Hereford, Quebec and parlayed that into a cut of about a million feet of logs. (Translation: The adjoining landowners probably had some of their logs removed also.)” One gets the impression that this was typical of George Van Dyke, ruthless and not above a little extra-legal maneuvering, especially if he could get away with it.

It seems that things always worked that way for George Van Dyke during that decade. He took that million feet of logs and drove them to a sawmill in South Lancaster, New Hampshire, just as the mill went bankrupt and none of the sawmill crew would work. As the bank took ownership of the mill, George commandeered his own crew of drivers to operate the sawmill and cut up his logs. All this just when lumber prices had skyrocketed, leaving George with a profit of $10,000 when everything was said and done.

In 1877, he and his partner Henry Merrill took over the sawmill at McIndoe Falls when that mill’s former owners went bankrupt. It wasn’t long before George bought out Henry’s part of the business and became sole owner. A few years after becoming general manager of the Connecticut River Lumber Company, he bought a part ownership of the company and became company president. In 1897, George paid George Scott and Pearsall $1.5 milllion dollars and became sole owner of the company.

As the years went by, George recognized that it would be easier to cart supplies and equipment up and down the river by railroad rather than by water. Established railroad lines did not want to expand to the North Country, fearing there wouldn’t be enough business. Undaunted, George built the Upper Coos Railroad and the Upper Coos and Hereford Railroad, which extended all the way to Sherbrooke, Quebec. Although he still shipped his logs down the Connecticut River, he did build some railroad spurs east and west of the river, to access even more timber.