You Had a Job for Life Read online

  History of Coos County, facsimile of the 1888 edition (Somersworth: New Hampshire Publishing Co., 1972; originally published by W. A. Fergusson & Co., Boston, 1888), 72. Georgia Drew Merrill is the probable, albeit uncredited, editor.

  Locals called Rumford, Maine, home of a large paper mill, “Cancer Valley.” Maine’s Bureau of Health Chronic Disease Surveillance Project found in the period 1984–1988 that the Rumford area had high rates of emphysema, asthma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, lung cancer, and aplastic anemia. Mitch Lansky, Beyond the Beauty Strip: Saving What’s Left of Our Forests (Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House, 1992), 58–59.

  Undated memo, written probably in August 1954, in possession of the Groveton Mill Oral History Project.

  Chapter Two

  FEEDING THE MILL

  PRIOR TO 1972, you could not miss the seventy-five-foot-high piles of pulpwood as you approached the village of Groveton from the south. The woodpiles formed a haunting symmetry with North and South Percy Peaks in the Nash Stream watershed, seven miles northeast of the Groveton Paper Mill. For nearly a century, loggers working in the Nash Stream and surrounding forests cut the wood destined for those piles that fed the mill throughout the winter.

  The forests of northern New Hampshire had survived the farmer’s and woodsman’s ax almost to the end of the century because of the region’s remoteness, rugged mountains, and lack of reliable transportation to major urban areas. In the summer of 1891, the lyrical “Locals” correspondent to the weekly Coos County Democrat celebrated the end of that era: “Now that the Concord and Montreal [Railroad] have got through the village [of Groveton], the way is open for them to escape for the mountains where a great amount of lumber is waiting to be handled by the cars. Unbroken forests farther than the eye can see—dense, silent, beautiful. Great trees, both soft and hard, seem crowded for room. The stillness in those great forests sometimes is too much for any man to bear. Beautiful, because natural, the various scenes—the shadows, the valleys, the hills, and various shades of foliage all combined will bring the sublimest thoughts to those who view the scenery from the hilltop or the valley.”1

  Intensive logging of New England’s old-growth forests, dominated by two-foot-diameter red spruce, supplied the lumber to construct the mid- and late nineteenth-century industrial cities of the northeastern United States. Reflecting populist sentiments of the day, the Democrat’s editor in 1894 lamented that absentee corporations, not farmers, owned most of the region’s forests: “But very little timber is owned by private individuals. We are perfectly safe in asserting that the farmers throughout the Coos country do not own enough timber to supply the home market, and most of them do not own enough for their own building purposes.”2

  The roof of the wood room and the woodpile, looking south, in the early 1950s. (Courtesy GREAT)

  Paper was made out of old rags and was relatively scarce and expensive until scientific advances in papermaking after the Civil War allowed mills to manufacture paper using wood fiber. The sudden abundance of cheap paper toward the end of the nineteenth century enabled the mass production of newspapers, magazines, books, and toilet paper. Around the time the old-growth forests were vanishing, paper mills with new, high-speed paper machines began to manufacture paper using smaller-diameter, second-growth spruce and fir logs.

  The long fibers of New England’s softwood spruce and fir produced high-quality paper. In the 1890s, investment capital poured into the northern New England wilderness to build paper mill towns in Millinocket and Rumford, Maine. Wall Street investors required new corporations, such as Great Northern and International Paper, to acquire millions of acres of forestlands to assure the mills’ wood supply. Nineteenth-century timber barons were eager to sell off their cut-over lands at bargain prices.

  The great rivers of the region—the Connecticut, Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot, as well as the smaller Upper Ammonoosuc River, supplied waterpower to drive pulpwood to the mill, water for the papermaking process, and steam to power the mill. In 1892 the Democrat reported: “The Weston Lumber Co. have completed their road into the big bogs in Odell. They have raised the dam six feet and have the bushes nearly all cut on the bog, which will give them a pond two miles long and a half mile wide. A large body of water to hold up in the mountains.”3 A decade later the paper mill acquired the Nash Stream, and until a disastrous flood in 1969 washed out the dam’s earthen abutment, the Nash Stream Bog assured adequate water supplies for the mill.

  Prior to the advent of heavy logging machinery in the 1950s, logging was a labor-intensive, winter activity. The nineteenth-century sawmills and the twentieth-century paper mills established logging camps at strategic places in the forests. Old-time loggers and teamsters driving horse-drawn sleds used the snow and ice to move sawlogs, and later four-foot pulp logs, from forest to river’s edge or to a railroad siding.

  Loggers often toiled in temperatures twenty or more degrees below zero from before sunrise until after sunset, equipped only with axes and handsaws. They cut, moved, and piled wood by hand. Many loggers and horses were killed or maimed when a horse-drawn sled sluiced—went out of control on an icy downhill stretch. Loggers suffered injury in a variety of ways, especially from an ax, a falling tree, or a “widow maker”—a broken or dead branch hung up on a tree that, when dislodged, could crush the unsuspecting logger. In 1899, Thomas Gibbons, while peeling pulpwood, was killed “by a limb falling the distance of about 70 feet, striking him on the head, breaking in his skull. He was helped to his feet by one of his companions and walked a mile after the accident.” The impoverished French Canadian died before the doctor arrived.4

  A river driver in the Nash Stream was badly injured by dynamite in 1898. In 1909, Henry Downing “was assisting on blasting the ice in the [Nash] stream when the ice broke, letting him into the water. The current carried him under the ice several feet but he caught his arm around a log and held himself up until men cut through the ice and rescued him.”5

  Over time, the Groveton paper mill accumulated about ninety thousand acres of timberland in northern Vermont and New Hampshire. When he bought the mill in 1940, Old Jim Wemyss retained most of the managers, but he replaced the superintendent of the woods operation with his friend Lester Fogg, who insisted the new owner accompany him on a tour of Nash Stream. “We had a lot of land,” Young Jim said. “They drove deep into Nash Stream, and [Fogg] walked him into the woods—in the snow. Father said, ‘I’m not ready to go in the goddamn snow like this. I’m not dressed for this, Lester.’ There was a dryer felt, which is off a paper machine, hung between two trees, and made kind of like a tepee. And in there was a horse, and there was a cot and a bucksaw, and a little stove. And he said, ‘You see this man here? This is how he’s working for you. To cut your wood. He lives with a horse.’ Not just us; this was all over the country. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘When somebody tells you to cut the price of wood to these people fifty cents a cord, you think about what you saw, and get down and figure out how to get the price of your paper up fifty cents. But don’t take the money away from your woodsmen. You need them. You can’t replace men like them. If you’re going to treat these men like that, I’ll work for you.’ My father did almost the same thing to me when I joined the company.”

  Near the entrance to the Nash Stream watershed the paper mill maintained a company farm that raised cattle and horses for its logging operations. The company’s logging camps boasted rudimentary bunkhouses, a cook shack, and shelters for horses, called “daigles.” On Lester Fogg’s advice, Old Jim phased out the camps during World War II. For the next couple of decades independent contractors operated logging camps. The contractors paid for equipment, insurance, wages, trucking, and sometimes road building.

  Albert Cloutier, a young blacksmith, arrived from southern Quebec in 1948 to work in one of the camps. He did most of his work at night: “If I shoe the horse in the morning, they lost time. I figure, what the hell, I’m gonna shoe them, and everybody’s happy. Every night somebody comes; we stayed
in the blacksmith shop sometimes till nine o’clock at night. Because the guys keep talking; all young guys like me. They start work, get up about five o’clock. We eat about six thirty, six, and the guys go get the horse ready and go in the woods. [In the daytime] I make some ax handles, carving some few little things. I sold ax handles for twenty-five cents.” Cloutier recalled that there were about a dozen horses in camp. Two men worked with one horse. One man would haul the logs to the log yard, where the other would cut them into four-foot lengths and pile them.

  By the 1940s, trucks transported most of the pulpwood. John Rich started hauling pulpwood from Nash Stream when he was fifteen. “My father had trucks,” Rich said. “I had a man with me; we loaded the pulp. There were piles along twitch roads. They’d get a road smoothened out in there in the winter, places you could never get into in the summer. That was a good job. I’d be the first one up there, about six o’clock. It was dark. Every morning it snowed. The air was all full of snow coming down—frost, sparkling away. It was pretty, really. Every morning you got an inch of fluff, anyways. Sometimes you got two feet.” One year, he recalled, “we hauled across a beaver dam. Jesus, it was all right until it started thawing in the spring.”

  A “scaler,” employed by the mill, measured each load of pulpwood delivered to the mill or to one of several piles along the Upper Ammonoosuc River. Most of the time, pulp drivers felt they were treated fairly by scalers. Herb Miles drove a truck in the late 1930s: “The scaler would be standing where you come out from the woods, or wherever you were hauling from. Run a stick up there. They could tell by looking at it. Four-foot sticks, three or four tier. The last of it, they had a scaler [at the mill] unloading it. He would scale it, and they would drive out to [the Red Dam a mile north of the mill] and dump it off and go back and get another load.”

  Occasionally, someone scammed the company, Miles remembered: “They had one fellow, he’d haul a load up through by the office, get a scale, and he’d go out and keep right on going and take it to Berlin and get a scale down there. They caught him after a while.”

  In the early 1950s mechanization revolutionized logging. One man, using a chainsaw and a skidder, could do the work of many old-time loggers and their increasingly obsolete horses. Gerard Labrecque remembered the early chainsaws: “When they first come out with a chainsaw—a chainsaw for two men. The blade was four feet long. On the end there was a handle in there. You could cut a big tree with that. My God, that was heavy. That’s why you needed two men to saw.” In the mid-1960s, huge chipping machines moved into the forest to turn whole trees into hardwood chips that the Groveton mill used for making its paperboard pulp and, after 1982, for feeding its boiler to generate the mill’s electricity.

  In springtime, the river crew would put up splashboards on the Red Dam and close the dam’s gates most of the way. The impounded water moved pulpwood to the mill in the summer months and supplied clean water required to make steam and paper. In the fall, the river crew would remove the Red Dam’s splashboards and install splashboards at the Brooklyn Dam next to the mill to hold water for the mill’s papermaking operations during the winter months. The river crew removed the Brooklyn Dam’s splashboards in the spring.

  Armand Gaudette was head of the river crew for decades. He was notorious for his liberal use of dynamite, his inability to swim, his imperviousness to frigid working conditions, and his malapropisms. Puss Gagnon recalled: “One time, he was cutting some steel for something. [He said,] ‘Jesus Christ, this steel’s soft.’ It ain’t soft, it’s all the same, for Christ’s sake.”

  After returning from Vietnam in 1969, Bruce Blodgett was assigned to work on Gaudette’s crew. “In the springtime that water’s ice cold,” Blodgett chuckled. “Gaudette would be working barehanded, while us other guys would have rubber-insulated gloves on, standing there freezing. He’d be almost in a T-shirt. Everybody else would be heavy jackets on. Kind of a tough guy.”

  John Rich enjoyed tormenting Gaudette: “We used to have a guy down in the wood room—Lionel Maltais from Stratford. That was one rugged boy. Armand had these big spikes. They must be about that long [a foot or more]; they spiked in cribbing out in the river. Maltais would take one of them old spikes, and he’d bend ’er. Then he’d flip ’er over, and he’d straighten ’er back out [laughs]. Armand says, ‘By Jesus, I ought to be able to do that.’ I said, ‘You ain’t got the guts to do that.’ I twitted him all the time. He tried to bend it, and he couldn’t do it. He’d get it in a vice with both hands. I said, ‘That’s cheating, Armand.’”

  Many of the river men could not swim. “I was working one day for [Gaudette] up Red Dam,” John Rich said. “Him and Everett Pierce got into a tussle about something in the house. He come running out, and Armand had stepped in the pail, and he was still trying to run with this pail on his foot. He went by me, and I gave him a nudge, and he went in. ‘You son of a bitch, I can’t swim.’ I said, ‘You’d better learn.’ We passed him over the pole and pulled him over to the boom. Armand, he was quite a rig.”

  After ice-out, the river crews began to knock the piles of softwood into the river, often using dynamite to free up frozen piles. Men working in pairs on rafts used pick poles to direct the wood toward the mill. “In the spring, I worked on the river up there, tearing [the woodpiles] apart on a raft,” Puss Gagnon said. “You stand on a raft, pull the wood out. When I first went up there, I was a little scared, but after, no, no. We used to even dynamite them piles. We’d take six sticks of dynamite, tie ’em on little sticks, and go out with the raft. Put them in the pulp pile. You’d find a hole in the wood, and you’d put ’em under the water. If it’s on top of the water, it’s too much open. I let a few go on top; I got scared of the sons of bitchin’ things. But after you do it a while, it’s not really that bad. I’ve been out there in the raft and the wood would come down—sink the raft right to the bottom of the river. You’d have to have the other guy come over and pick you out. That’s what was the bad part. I never could swim a stroke.” Puss developed a bad habit on the rafts: “I had a tendency to keep moving this foot ahead. Sooner or later I’d walk off the end of this fuckin’ thing. Here I go. I knew I was going; I couldn’t kind of swing my weight so to stay on the raft.”

  “We had a logjam at the Brooklyn Dam, and the guys were throwing dynamite at the ice,” Jim Wemyss Jr. recalled with amusement. “[Snip Cushing] looked at me: ‘Mr. Wemyss, they’re nuts. That’s not how you get the ice out of there.’ I said, ‘Well, Snip, how would you get it out of there?’ ‘Go over to the mill and get me some cutter stick.’ They were bars about one and one-eighth inch square about eight feet long. ‘Get me a couple of bottles of Old Overholt whiskey.’ That’s one-hundred-proof whiskey. ‘And get me half a dozen sticks of dynamite and some caps and some twine.’ ‘OK.’ He takes the dynamite and wraps it around the end of the stick and he sticks a cap in it, and he’s got a cigarette. ‘Give me that Old Overholt.’ He takes a big swig. ‘Would you like one, Jim?’ I said, ‘Not right now.’ He said, ‘Come on with me.’ We walked out on the boom logs. ‘Stand right behind me, and light that thing when I tell you to.’ He shoved the dynamite right down under the corner of the logs. He said, ‘The blast always goes [sideways], it doesn’t go back this way.’ BANG! Jesus Christ! The ice started to rumble. ‘Give me another one of these.’ In about ten minutes all the ice had blown out. Of course two or three more shots of Old Overholt.”

  The mill’s 1920s in-house publication, Gropaco News, wrote: “When the ‘Drive’ is on, the river, filled with logs, has the appearance of a corduroy road; there is little or no water to be seen.”6 Strategic release of water from the Nash Bog Dam and the Red Dam flushed the pulpwood down to boom logs by the mill. If the wind blew the wood upstream, the river crew had to pull the wood down to the mill. Francis Roby, whose handshake was still bone-crunching in his mid-eighties, said: “You had to put a boom and pull [pulpwood] down with the boom. Just pull with a rope. You have a walkway on the edge of the river. There’d
be one on each side. You’d pull that boom that you’d got in there—you got a rope on it and you’d pull it right down.”

  At the mill, crews with long pick poles pulled the four-foot logs out of the river and onto a conveyor belt that carried the logs up to the drum barker. Before shipping out to Vietnam in 1968, Pete Cardin worked on the crew: “I was eighteen years old. A skinny little kid. There was a couple of us that got hired at about that time. All just kids. Then you’ve got all these old-timers who’d been there forever. Of course, they’re going to test the new kids to see if you’re going to make it. You either make it or you don’t. My hands were baby hands, and boy, there’s a trick to pulling pulp out of the river. They use pick poles. You go out, and you stab a piece of pulp, and you use that piece of pulp to kind of haul in the rest of the pulp, and you have a big drag chain that’s going, and you pull it into the trough and up the drag chain. You’d kind of throw it like a two-handed spear—tsssh. Then you’d just pull that one piece of pulp, and that would kind of catch onto others.”

  “There was always the initiation, and you had to end up in the river,” Cardin laughed. “That river back then was pretty foul. Yes, it was pretty nasty. There was an awful lot of discharge in that river. You could throw something out on the river and it wouldn’t splash; it would go bloooopp. There was always this head of beer, this head of foam. Nasty.”

  “You’d sweat. You wouldn’t fall in purposely,” old-timer Francis Roby remembered. “I fell in a couple of times. You’d miss a stick, and you’d go into the water. Them were the good days.”

  The conveyor took the pulpwood up to the drum barker, a violent spinning cylinder that removed the bark from the log. After the wood passed through the drum barker, a three-man crew culled the logs that retained some bark and dropped them onto a return conveyor so they could take another trip through the barker. “That was a man’s job,” Roby said with satisfaction. “That was a good job.”