The Lumberman's Museum

     In Patten, ME, about an hour north of Lincoln, is a wonderful museum to the memory of those intrepid foresters that brought the millions of trees to market during the twenties and thirties. At the heart of the industry were the many Maine lumber camps scattered around within sight of Mt. Katahdin. On Wednesday, Dick Roth, Phil Andrews and I visited that museum. Phil is an old-time Maine forester, so we had our own personal docent.

     There is a visitor's center with many interesting displays and an informative and entertaining movie to set the stage. The bulk of the museum is contained in a collection of actual log cabins. The primary cabin was a two-part structure with a bunkhouse on one end and a cook shack and dining room on the other. The cook (the highest paid guy in the camp) and his helpers served four meals a day. They consisted of: tea, canned beef, ham, beans, donuts, and cookies.

     Look at the rows of charcoal colored spots. These were bean hole pits. There are sixteen of them here. Each one had a fire in it, followed by the lowering of a cast iron pot of beans and salt pork into the hole. It was then covered and let to rest for a half a day. Beans were an everyday meal. 

     Woe be it to the cook's helper who did not keep the wood box full.

     Horses were a big part of hauling the logs out of the woods. Blacksmith's, therefore, were essential to  the operation.

     

     

Obviously, I don't have any photographs of the log drivers doing their calked boot ballet on the logs as they floated downstream to the mill in the Spring. We did, however, see a number of movie clips that stagger the imagination. There sure were a lot of ways to get hurt in that business. There were some boats used in the harvest. They were specialized to the extent that the screw and the rudder had to be protected so that the boat could pass over the logs.

          An interesting legacy of the era comes from the invention by Al Lombard in 1901 of a steam-engined, continuous track driven, ski steered behemoth of a tractor to pull a train of log laden sleds out of the woods. They even had watering machines (Zambonis ?) to ice the road surface. That track propulsion Lombard invented enabled the WWI tanks and generations of construction equipment.

 On the way back to Belfast we toured a few miles of the scenic loop of the newly designated Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. It was an overcast day but the views were still impressive.