By the last decade of the 19th 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 10th, 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.
