Guilded Age Log Drives Down the Connecticut River

David Sumner, lumber baron of Hartland, Vermont, died in 1867 at age 97. Sumner had owned large tracts of land near the Connecticut Lakes, and hired crews of men to cut logs off his land in the north country and float them down the Connecticut River to Hartland. In Hartland, many of the logs were cut into lumber, loaded onto rafts, and floated downstream to Holyoke and Chicopee, Massachusetts, or Hartford, Connecticut. Some were diverted away from the shallow rapids through a canal and lock system and sent whole down river to be sawn into lumber somewhere further south. As impressive as Sumner's log drives were, the huge log drives that have become so famous in the history of the Upper Valley occurred after Sumner's death.

David Sumner died in 1867, at the end of the Civil War and at the very beginning of the Gilded Age, when cities and towns across America grew at a feverish pace. The economy was booming and lumber from Northern New England was in huge demand as new buildings sprung up everywhere. Everything was happening on a huge scale, and that included the log drives down the Connecticut River.

Although railroads had arrived in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, they did not reach into northern timber forests, but the streams and rivers did. When transportation methods for most goods produced in northern New England switched to the railroads, logs continued to be floated down the river. Most of the small lumber mills along the way went out of business, and the logs were driven downriver in gigantic drives all the way from the Canadian border to Southern Massachusetts and Connecticut.

In 1869, O.F. Richardson of Bangor, Maine was hired to head a log drive of 1.7 million board feet of logs from the Canadian border to Holyoke. In his book “Log Drives on the Connecticut River”, author Bill Gove describes that first huge log run. “Richardson looked to some seasoned rivermen of Maine to handle the task, and he brought 36 seasoned veterans down with him, including one man who was 56 years old.” These men had honed their trade on the Penobscot River in Maine, and were unfamiliar with the Connecticut River. They had a fair amount of trouble that first year, when logs would get caught up in the eddies below the dams and rapids and they had to work all night to pick them out and send them on their way. Gove says that the men “would form a single file into the river, hold hands for steadiness and security, and the man at the far end, the “post of honor” had the dangerous job of pushing individual logs back into the river. (This is where the phrase “log jam” comes from, when someone refers to a log jam of paperwork or a log jam of traffic.)

They were quick learners, though, and in a few years crews from Maine moved larger and larger payloads of logs down the Connecticut River. In 1873, a crew of 150 men drove 26 million board feet of lumber from the Connecticut Lakes to Holyoke. The first recorded fatalities occurred the next year, when two men drowned near White River Junction while trying to cross from one log jam to another. The River is particularly dangerous around White River and Hartland, where currents are strong, eddies are common, and the river is not always predictable. The many bridges across the river in the Upper Valley created even more hazards, as logs tended to jam up around their stone supporting piers. Rivers in New England are most dangerous in the Spring when water is high due to spring thaw runoff, not only because the current is super fast but also because the water is freezing cold. Log drives had to take place in the Spring because as the water level receded during the dry summer, the level of water in the river would not be sufficient to float all those logs.

After the Civil War, the only places that still had significant amounts of timber available for logging were in the northwest and northeast corner of the country. In the northeast, lumber and logging companies drove more and more logs downriver every year to feed the building frenzy as America grew during the Guilded Age. The log drivers devised new methods to drive more logs faster, and break log jams more quickly. In typical Guilded Age fashion, these new practices were good for the companies but even more dangerous for the workers. Logs were gathered behind booms, lengths of chain stretched across the river, under the theory that logs jams that were built by loggers would be more manageable than those created by the random forces of the river. Log drivers used dynamite to blow up log jams. Bill Gove describes the time a jam on the ledges at Bellows Falls was broken when a men was let down by rope between two bridges and picked the key logs out of the jam, then yanked back up as the jam broke beneath him.

Robert Pike, writing for The Atlantic Online, describes log driving as a profession that was dangerous to life and limb, not just some of the time, but every minute.

“The heavy, slippery logs that he had to roll, pry and lift would fly back at him

and knock him literally to kingdom come, or he himself would slip and a
whole rollway would pass over him, leaving not enough to bury. On the
Penobscot, rivermen buried their dead comrades where they found them,
hanging their spiked boots on tree branches over their graves. At Mulliken's
Pitch, at the foot of the Fifteen-Mile Falls on the Connecticut, they used to
bury rivermen in empty pork barrels. When the New England Power Company
built to great dam precisely at the Pitch in 1930, it excavated half a dozen of
those makeshift coffins, the old spiked boots still intact.”

Milliken's Pitch was said to be the most dangerous place in the whole river. Also called the Fifteen Mile Falls, this spot was located in Monroe, New Hampshire at the very northern boundary of Grafton County. It was destroyed when the dam was built.

There weren't many riverdrivers from the Upper Valley, and by this time, the log bosses and lumber company owners were from the north country as well. The log drives came right through the Upper Valley every year, though, and the vast majority of dangerous spots were between Barnet, Vermont and Bellows Falls. Crews would sometimes have to wait for days on end for log jams to break up, taking the opportunity to visit saloons, restaurants and sometimes brothels in the river towns.