'From Stump to Mill' by Fred Cowan of Canaan, Vt., offers a glimpse into the area's logging history, taking readers along as he follows the timber harvests of past and present, on their journey from stump to mill.

Sentinel sports writer Butch Ladd draws on his lifelong passion for North Country sports to pen his weekly column 'On the Ball.' Butch keeps readers and fans abreast of what's new on the local sports scene, from pee wee and Little League to high school varsity and college athletics.

The only way to read Fred and Butch's writings each week is to subscribe; in the meantime, here's a sample of one column from this week's paper:

As mentioned earlier, the annual springtime high water resulting from the normal snow melt could almost always be counted on to fill our rivers and streams to overflowing. It was that high water that made possible the floating of masts for sailing ships down to the coastal shipyards of New England; the long logs down to the water-powered sawmills that turned out the timbers and boards used in building our ancestors' homes and barns; and the pulpwood which, only about 150 years ago, began to replace rags in making pulp for the paper mills, and made possible the newspapers such as the one you are now holding in your hands. It was also that high water, with its flooding of lowlands and the lower flow that was eventually bound to follow, that frequently made river-driving a nightmare.

It is the nature of rivers and streams that they are always changing. What was a smooth, gently flowing stretch of river one day can become a raging torrent overnight, overflowing its banks and flooding the lowlands, the result of even a brief thunderstorm or a rapid thawing of the snow in the mountains. An extended dry period can result in water too shallow to float even a stick of pulpwood. A combination of those possibilities, all too often, took wood from an otherwise orderly river drive out of the river channel, spread it all over a now-flooded meadow, or tangled it up among the trees and brush of valley-bottom woodlands and then, as the water level dropped, left it there to be salvaged or rot.

Some stranded logs or pulpwood were to be expected during any river drive, even when nature cooperated completely. Some wood always found a way to get pushed out of the main stream and into the blind alleys of former river channels. Other logs or bolts of pulpwood just got stuck on gravel bars, wedged between boulders or outcrops of ledge. Some of this wood could be cleared and dragged back into the channel by the men who had been stationed all along the river during the passage of the main drive at expected trouble spots, such as islands, bridges, waterfalls and dams. Recovering and re-floating the wood that had been spread by high water all over the full width of the valley bottom, and then been left high and dry when the water level fell back to normal driving pitch, was the job of that part of the river-drive crew with the difficult, but less glamorous job of "sweeping the rear."

Sweeping the rear during a normal spring and early summer river drive, if there ever was such a thing, was at best laborious work. Some logs were always being crowded up onto low spots along the riverbank or into the dead-end logan holes scattered along the valley bottom, pushed there by the mass of following wood, usually while rounding a bend or entering a narrows. This wood had to be dragged back into present river channel to rejoin the drive while the water was still at a good driving pitch. Wood that didn't reach its intended destination didn't help to repay the costs of building the logging camp, buying food for a large number of men and horses for quite a few months, and paying those men for cutting the wood and getting it into the river.

Getting either strayed long logs or four-foot bolts of pulpwood back into the river wasn't an easy task.  Even a short 10- or 12-foot-long spruce sawlog of modest diameter would be more than enough for one or two men to drag very far on even the relatively smooth, firm ground of a meadow or hayfield. If that log was one of a dozen, a hundred, or even a thousand logs--most with lengths of 16 to 32 feet--that had been swept or pushed from the main river during a period of high water and then deposited onto wet, swampy, wooded or brushy areas, or into the ponds and ox-bows of former stream beds, it would not only require a few horses and teamsters to twitch them back into the river, but a number of additional men with axes and cant-dogs to untangle the logs, and even to swamp out trails leading back to the river. 

Stranded pulpwood was, in some respects, even more of a problem. There were more of these individual sticks carried farther from the useful channel of the river and scattered about. While some of the smaller-diameter bolts could be carried or dragged a short distance over open ground by a man with his pulphook, big sticks that had ended up stranded in the more brushy spots could be a problem. One stick of pulpwood is hardly worth wrapping with a choke-chain and pulling back into the river with a horse, but sometimes even two strong lads trying to wrestle such a piece of wood any distance to the running water might find it a real task. There were some in-stances, usually after high water had left a lot of pulpwood in an open hayfield or pasture, that it paid to first gather up bundles of those four-foot-long bolts, wrap these in a chain, and then pull these bundles with a horse back to the river.

There was one more difference between the handling of stranded long logs and of pulpwood: Driving the long logs required a large and nearly continuous volume of water to float that year's entire production all the way down to its destination. A log drive was almost always at the mercy of the water-level fluctuations resulting from varying rates of the snow melt, plus the size and frequency of the rain showers of spring and early summer. Pulpwood, being smaller in length and diameter, required less water depth to enable it to float over and past the many natural and man-made obstacles along the way. Thus, stranded long logs had to be returned to the river by the "sweepers" and rejoin the drive with little delay, or those logs would be left behind to decay or perhaps be salvaged by the owner of the land on which they rested.

The starts of pulpwood drives, however, could be and often were delayed until the highest pitch of snow-melt water had passed, and then these drives could be spread out over much of the remaining spring and summer. As an example, the sluicing of pulpwood into various points along the upper Connecticut River during the 1940s, together with its haul-out at the Lancaster debarking plant, was a gradual operation, rather than being rushed as rapidly as possible. With less wood in the river at any one time, the pulpwood drive crew usually spent most of the entire season traveling back and forth along that entire section of the river--upstream by truck and then down in a bateau.

While doing this, they would continually sweep the shore and the other adjacent low-lying land wherever strays might have floated after being pushed over the riverbank by high water caused by a heavy shower, and then left stranded on gravel bars and farmers' hayfields as the water level returned to a more normal pitch.

(Issue of May 7, 2008)