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Local Logging History “On the shores of the Pond of Safety
. . . around a great steam sawmill that Although settlers in Randolph in the early 1800s set up small sawmills in the valley, industrial logging did not come to the area traversed by the Four Soldiers Path until well after the Civil War. In 1885, the firm of G.W. & N.W. Libbey of Whitefield bought forestland in Randolph. They moved a sawmill from Priscilla Brook in Jefferson to the Pond of Safety, beginning more than a decade of logging and milling spruce and pine from the surrounding forests. During the winter, the milled lumber could be towed the seven miles into the valley on horse-drawn sleds. In the late 19th century, spruce was typically rough sawn for framing lumber and pine was sawn for boards, although, says Berlin native and mill owner Barry Kelley, “if they had a stand of spruce and wanted boards and framing lumber, they would have done both.” Randolph historian George N. Cross described the character of the forest in the heyday of logging. “On the shores of the Pond of Safety . . . around a great steam sawmill that employed a hundred men, hummed a village of shacks, stables, and a boarding-house. . . . In a few winters, the beautiful forest region about the Pond of Safety was converted into a desert of brooding silence. Such mushroom villages sprang up winter after winter on the slopes and in the ravines of Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, marking the slow march of ruin and destruction down the beautiful Randolph valley.” In its early days, the sawmill at the Pond of Safety generated a huge pile of sawdust that could be seen for miles around and was referred to as Mount Sawdust. Since there was no use for the sawdust, it was left where the crude saws of the era produced it. As late as 1931, the Appalachian Mountain Club guidebook referred to Mount Sawdust as a landmark. It was the habit of the Libbey Company to move operations to a forest location, harvest the usable timber, then move on. In this case, the Libbeys sold their Randolph lands to the Brown Lumber Company of Whitefield in 1895. After running into financial difficulties in 1902, Brown Lumber Company sold all these Randolph holdings to the Berlin Timber Lands Company, the real estate arm of the Brown Company (no relation) of Berlin. The available record of the Berlin Brown Company’s activities in Randolph is sketchy, but local residents remember logging camps set up in the 1940s, possibly to clean up after the Hurricane of 1938, and in the 1950s. During the 1960s, the Brown Company contracted an independent logger to harvest timber in Stag Hollow including the Pond of Safety area, according to Walter Wintturi of Watershed to Wildlife Inc., Randolph’s town forester. In the late 1960s and 1970s, timber sale contracts were supervised by Brown Company foresters. In 1980, ownership of the land changed; however, the forest through which the Four Soldiers Path passes seems to have been managed by the same Brown Co. foresters. In 1993, ownership of the land was transferred again, this time to the Hancock Timber Resource Group (HTRG), which continued the practice of managing the forest via contract. In 1998, a three-day ice storm devastated the forest. HTRG harvested as many of the stands as possible to put the timber to practical use before it deteriorated. In 2000, HTRG forestland was sold to the Trust for Public Lands, who subsequently arranged the sale to the White Mountain National Forest and the Town of Randolph as the Randolph Community Forest. The Town’s long-term goals for the Forest include encouraging the growth of high-quality, saw-timber products, preserving existing trails for the public, encouraging plant and animal diversity, and protecting the water resources, streams, and wetlands within the Forest’s boundaries.
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