Maine History Online

Logging operations grew in proportion to the national demand for lumber products, which grew in proportion to the expansion of the nation itself over the 19th and well into the 20th centuries. The industry became extensive and complex entailing surveyors to identify likely stands of trees, lumbermen to cut timber, teamsters and their draft animals to haul logs, scalers to measure the timber's worth, and river drivers to float logs to the mills.

The enterprise culminated in mills and sawyers who converted logs into marketable products, and made Bangor the preeminent lumber town of the region from the 1830s through about 1880.

The woods teamed with lumber camps during the winter months. First using axes, later saws, lumbermen systematically harvested specific trees for specific uses –– pine and oak for shipbuilding, cedar for shingles, spruce and fir for pulp, and so on.

Loggers often worked independently before 1820 when logging cooperatives became common. Soon, boom corporations took charge of the logging and removal of timber to sawmills or ships.

Winter was the preferred logging season for cutting trees because of ease of movement over snow and over frozen lakes and rivers. Logs piled on riverbanks in the winter could be moving into swollen spring rivers for transport to sawmills downstream.

The penetration of logging into forests was apparent from the debris left behind or the absence of certain kinds of trees. Venturing three times into Maine's forests in the middle of the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau wrote of seeing stumps "as high as one's head," evidence of cutting when the snows were deep, and of noticing indentations on certain rocks "made by the spikes on the lumberers' boots" as they struggled to portage their bateaux.

Coming across the occasional "defective" white pine rejected by the loggers as worthless, Thoreau lamented the impact logging had had on Maine's forests where a "war against the pines" had inexorably altered the landscape. It was, however, a landscape that had greatly benefited local, national, and imperial economies over the decades, and plumped the pockets of lumber barons, large landowners, and corporations alike.

Folklore romanticizes the figure of the lumberjack glossing over the hardships, dangers, and deprivations of logging operations, particularly the final river run to towns and mills. Indeed, ordinary woodsmen were far less likely to benefit much from either of the industry's major incarnations, whether long logs for sawmills, or short for paper mills.

Loggers lived in camps in the woods during the cutting season. George Kephart, a forester, described the 1920s era pulpwood camps in his book, Campfires Revisited. The bunks provided less than 20 square feet per man for sleeping.

He described the bunks as "double-deck muzzle-loader bunks with deacon seats." The bunks – upper and lower – "had no springs or mattresses, but they were provided with a liberal thickness of hay or straw, which each man could renew at his own pleasure." There were spreads and blankets but no sheets and, sometimes, pillows.

Kephart wrote, "The intention was to wash the spreads once a year by dunking them in hot, soapy water. Sometimes the annual wash was overlooked, regardless of how many men had used the spreads."

Life in the camps was far from luxurious. Many of the loggers came from Canada, working seasonally in the woods in Maine, then returning home in the summer. Others came from communities all over the northern part of the state.

Still, there was a certain romance to the lumbermen and log drivers, captured by several writers, including Fanny Hardy Eckstorm. In her 1904 book, The Penobscot Man, Eckstorm wrote about river drivers leaving to deal with a logjam:

These were the men, who armed heels smote fire from the rocks, whose peavies jangled a battle-note, whose short step lengthened to a stride as they saw the river sweeping past and their boats before them, saw the rapids race at the tail of Ambajemackomas and heard on the upstream draught of air the ominous war of a full flood growling on the Horse Race below … It is a pretty sight to see a phalanx of picked watermen rally, as if by bugle call, to face their ancient enemy, the River.

Banned in the 1970s because of the pollution they caused, the great log drives down the Penobscot, Kennebec and Androscoggin Rivers are long gone, but the detritus of those efforts encrusts the riverbanks and molders within the riverbeds today. Some tributaries still show remnants of abandoned sluices and dams, once vital elements of moving cut lumber to mills.

Like most industries, logging became progressively mechanized, particularly in the 20th century. Additionally specific species were over harvested, competition emerged from the northwest, Canada, and elsewhere, and the demand increasingly shifted away from cut lumber toward pulp for papermaking.

While lax in the early years, Maine's stewardship of its forests brought better management practices and a reduction in landownership by lumber and paper companies later. The industry has been in a long period of transition since the middle of the 20th century, and its future has yet to be determined as much of Maine's economy diversifies away from traditional natural resource industries.