RMC Newsletter - Winter 2005-2006

Logging on the Northern Peaks, 1865-1912
By Judith Maddock Hudson

Throughout nineteenth-century New England, lumber and wood products were in heavy demand. Huge conifers, mostly pine, were felled to serve as ship's masts; pine and spruce were often cut as the settlers cleared land, providing building materials. As the century progressed, enormous log drives on larger rivers transported timber to the mills for processing. Lumbering was first concentrated near the more accessible southern forests where saw mills manufactured building lumber, clapboards and shingles, and other factories processed bark for the tanning industry, made barrel staves, and, after the 1870's, processed pulp into paper.

Northern New Hampshire's shallow, rocky rivers, less satisfactory arteries for log drives, lessened the initial impact of the lumberman's axe upon the northern White Mountains. The cities' appetite for wood products, however, continued to grow. By mid-century, the railroads were beginning to spread north through the river valleys, offering cheap transport to the lumberman. The first tracks laid by the Atlantic & St. Lawrence railroad reached Gorham along the Androscoggin River in 1851. In southern New Hampshire, trains brought portable steam-driven saw mills that facilitated clear-cutting of the forests. The pace of railroad expansion accelerated, sparked by the tremendous success of rail transport during the Civil War.1

By the end of the Civil War, wood products were more in demand than ever, and the lumber barons were clamoring for access to northern forest land. The bulk of the White Mountain forests had been held in public domain by the state of New Hampshire. Lobbied intensely by the lumber industry to sell the state's lands, in 1867 Governor Harriman and the legislature saw this short term windfall as a painless way to benefit public education by establishing a "literary fund" from its profits.2 The lumber barons were quick to harvest their lands, bringing rapid deforestation to large tracts of land, especially on the lower slopes. Resistance was slow to be organized, but by 1881 a conservationist initiative had convinced the NH legislature to establish a forestry commission. Joseph B. Walker, an ardent proponent of sustainable timbering and chairman of the new commission, addressed the problems created by the wholesale lumbering in a talk before the New Hampshire Fish and Game League in April, 1883. The state, he felt, had squandered its valuable resources:

And the state itself, I regret to say, has done her full share in the sad destruction [of our forests]...by selling to lumber operators in 1867 the whole body of her very valuable timber lands lying in the three counties of Carroll, Grafton, and Coös, according to the deeds of conveyance, 172,000 acres more or less.3

The first deed, dated October 17, 1867, was for $500, and conveyed lands "within a circular area six miles in diameter, of which the centre is Tip-Top House." Following subsequent sales in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, the total revenue for the sale amounted to $25,000, a price of 14.5 cents per acre. Walker continued:

The only consolation to be derived from this extraordinary transaction is, that the state thereby secured itself against further folly in this direction by the sale of its last forest acre.

Walker was already warning the state about the problems caused by wholesale clearcutting: the deleterious effects it had on soil fertility, maintenance of steady river flows, the impact of erosion, and the damage done to the summer resort trade. He called for legislative penalties for criminal or careless firesetting, for improving existing areas, and for purchasing denuded areas to become public lands.

If the legislature, which has wasted hundreds and thousands of dollars in useless talk about crows and woodchucks, would turn its attention to the condition and interests of the forests, and establish a state department of forestry in the agricultural college, it would confer a benefit upon its landed interest far surpassing any as yet rendered it.4

As the various lumber companies developed lumber operations that could be serviced by rail, their axes were coming ever closer to the Randolph Valley, especially to the north. Cutting during the winter of 1883 severely damaged early pathmaker Eugene Cook's recent trail from Randolph Hill to the Ice Gulch.5 There is certain evidence that the lower Presidential slopes had experienced logging periodically during the 1870s and 80s. G. H. Scudder, in January 1884, had photographed a "logging road at Cold Brook" and "the deserted Camp Thunder on the Mt Adams Path."6 In 1885 G. W. & N. W. Libbey of Whitefield bought property northwest of Randolph, and moved a portable saw mill into the Pond of Safety area.7 On the eastern slopes the Osgood Trail from the Glen House was obliterated by lumber operations in 1887.8

Fire was a constant danger in clear-cut tracts where piles of tinder-dry slash could be ignited by sparks from wood-fired locomotives. On July 7, 1886, Cook's niece Marian Pychowska was hiking just off the Davis Path when, as she later noted in a letter to her friend Isabella Stone:

Earlier in the day we had noticed the smoke that rose from behind Mt. Franklin. Now it had filled Crawford Notch and drifted way round to Conway, while great yellow-brown volumes rolled up from the increasing fire, making the southern landscape all lurid, the air about us being still clear.9

The fire she saw that day was the first of two disastrous blazes in "New Zealand" valley: in 1886, 12,000 acres were burned when a spark ignited the slash; in 1903, during a very dry spring, another 10,000 acres was consumed.10 There was no way to extinguish the fires other than wait for a good rain. Closer to Randolph, the crest of Pine Mountain burned more than once between 1897 and 1903; huge fires, most ignited by locomotives, raged on the Carter Range and through much of the Wild River drainage. George N. Cross, in his diary from 1898, witnessed the latter fire from Randolph:

July 16: All day great volumes of smoke have been rolling up from a mighty forest fire on the other side of the Carters in the great wilderness. Tonight there is a lurid light above the tree tops. Only rain will extinguish this fire...

July 17: The fire on the Carters is said to be in the Wild River region. It has blazed up again today.

On July 30, Cross pasted into his diary an account from the Boston Herald, dated July 28, 1898:

...The heavy rains have quenched the great forest fires which...have been raging over the crest of Mt. Moriah...During the seven [actually 12 or 13] days the fires burned they have swept over at least 3000 acres and done thousands of dollars damage. Most of the territory is controlled by the Hastings Lumber Company.11

The 1892 completion of the Boston & Maine railroad through Randolph Valley made timber harvesting on the Presidentials a reality. First intimations of this appear in 1895 when the AMC purchased, for $400, a strip of land 600 feet wide around the waterfalls on Snyder Brook, as reported by the Trustees of Real Estate:

We were led to make this purchase because of information, suddenly received in the month of January, that Mr. Watson had begun the cutting of his timber, and that, without immediate action on our part, the beauty of the surroundings of the Madison Path would be largely, if not altogether, destroyed.12

The first major inroads on the Northern Peaks began on the western branch of the Israel River up into Jefferson Notch. On Louis Cutter's 1898 blueprint-map, a railroad spur extended to above the 1800-foot level, with camps around 1500 and 1800 feet. By 1906 (on a revision of the Cutter map) logging roads had climbed high up into Castle Ravine and across the Lowe's Path, obliterating most of the lower section of Edmands' original Israel Ridge Path.

Louis Cutter recalled the pillaging:

It was not a clean cut: spruce mainly was desired, and many of the hardwood trees were left standing. The lower slopes...were (to outward appearance) but little altered, though they lost their sprinkling of black spires. But on the middle slopes the growth was...almost pure spruce, and in these places the ground was denuded. On the steep upper slopes...it was deemed necessary to cut clean, worthless and valuable trees together, in order to extricate the few logs of commercial value and roll them down to the logging roads.13

As Randolph's hotel guests and cottagers returned for their vacations, the cutting on the slopes was more apparent each summer. Trails were often severely disrupted, and the only access for walkers was on the lumberman's roads. In 1903 Edmands, distressed by the obliteration of his trails, relocated from Randolph to Bretton Woods, where he continued his work as a pathmaker. Cutter was forced to revise his 1898 map constantly, annotating the copy that was posted at the Ravine House. A comment from 1904 read, "the Link and Israel Ridge and Castle paths are said to be impassable."

The Spur Cabin Register14 for August 21, 1905 contains Charles C. Torrey's account of an exploratory hike he and his 73-year-old father Joseph made to locate Edmands' original Israel Ridge Path.

J. Torrey and C.C. Torrey started in at Bowman Station, intending to see whether anything could be made out of the Edmands path (spoiled by lumbering in 1903-04). Found it almost completely ruined. Left Bowman at 7:50, and crashed & crawled through miles of slash and debris, reaching Cascade Camp at 10 o’clock.

During the summer of 1905, perhaps as a consequence of this excursion, Torrey mapped the extent of the lumbering, indicating the logging by red crosshatching on a sketch map of the Northern Peaks. The following summer he negotiated with Mr. Williams and Mr. Moynahan of the Berlin Mills Company, and succeeded in creating a "reservation" that was to protect Spur Cabin from the loggers' axes:

September 22. C.C. Torrey arrived at 9 AM, with Mr. Williams, the Surveyor of the Berlin Mills Co. Ran a line around the Cabin; starting at a point on The Canyon Falls path, six rods below the Chandler Falls junction, going straight up the mountain; then turning to the West and running just below the cliffs; then turning again at a right angle and coming down through the point where the “Shelf Path” crosses the first little water-way. Also ran lines around Chandler and Canyon Falls, making a small “Forest reserve of the B.M. Co.” at each place. “Lunch” with the lumbermen, on the logging road just built at the head of Canyon fall. Two logging roads already extending from that point more than half way to the Cabin reservation. Consultation with Mr. Moynahan. Heavy rain. Down with Mr. Williams (on the run) at 12:30.

September 25. Mrs. M.H. Moore, Misses Alice Bell and Mary Bell, A.H. Moore and C.C. Torrey arrived at the Cabin at noon. Lumbermen cutting in the neighborhood of our spring. CCT had another interview with Mr. Moynahan, who promised to withdraw his men from the work on this side of Spur Brook tomorrow noon, while waiting for further word from the negotiations pending. Work about the Cabin.

September 26. More cutting of spruces above the spring. All but MHM went across to Gray Knob and down Lowe’s Path. CCT came down Spur Trail, and did a little more surveying on the new cut-off above the brook. All met at the Cabin for lunch. “This is the last tree,” said one of the loggers of a spruce which came down at about 11:30.

Despite this agreement with the loggers, the lumbering continued for the next few years in the surrounding area. Torrey wrote on September 16, 1908:

September 16. ... spent most of the forenoon clearing out the upper path westward, including a great pile of logs and slash left by the lumbermen [Torrey includes a short comment in a Semitic script].

Although an intense campaign to save the White Mountain forests had begun as far back as the early 1880's, progress was frustratingly slow. The first Forestry Commission had produced a 100-page report in 1883 detailing its investigation and recommendations. A second commission appointed in 1889 recommended legislation in 1891. By 1893 the state legislature had passed a forestry law which supported (but seemingly did not enforce) conservative forest management that would produce sustainable harvests.15

Much of the agenda at the AMC's 1893 annual field meeting in Jefferson was devoted to the logging threat, with presentations by Joseph Walker, Dartmouth professor Colby of the second forest commission, Edmands, geologist C. H. Hitchcock of Dartmouth, and Laban Watson, who reported that in Randolph "only good timber had been cut and fires had been kept out."16 AMC members worked to influence the US Congress to enact laws that would protect the forest. Edmands, part of this group, brought influential men to his mountain camps, hoping to persuade them to help. A major collective step was the founding of the Society for the Protection of NH Forests in 1901, which helped spearhead the campaign at both state and national levels.

Bills were introduced into Congress, but failed to win support, often not even reaching the floor for a vote. Meanwhile, the devastating cutting and fires continued. In 1902, the AMC's Trustees for Real Estate reported:

The paths...and the attractiveness of this whole region are threatened seriously by the large lumber operations begun on the slopes of Mts. Jefferson and Adams. Members of the Board have visited Berlin, and the lumber camps upon the mountains, in each of the months of September, October and November. We are also represented in all three of the bodies which are trying against heavy odds to have something upon Mts. Adams and Madison saved from speedy destruction.17

By the following year (1903) the same Trustees sensed "a change in public opinion" in support of a National Reservation on the Presidential Range.18 Congressional action, however, was still years away, and by the time legislative action was taken, largely because of Massachusetts congressman and Lancaster NH native John Weeks' skillful maneuvering, most of the virgin timber on the Presidentials had been destroyed.

Eventually in 1911 Congress passed the Weeks Act, creating the first eastern national forests in the White Mountains and Appalachia. Boundaries for the complete White Mountain National Forest reservation were drawn, and the first purchases, some 37,000 acres, were made in 1911. About 272,000 acres had been acquired by 1916.19

Before the Weeks Act had been signed into law, the Northern Peaks trail system had been greatly reduced. As shown on Cutter's 1908 map, large segments of major trails (the Link, Castle Ravine, Israel Ridge, Castle paths) had vanished, along with many branch paths. Piles of slash made fire a constant threat. The original pathmakers were no longer active. Hunt had died in 1903, Peek in 1905. Charles Lowe, who had become the proprietor of the Mount Crescent House, died in 1907. Cook was over seventy, his sister Lucia was also aging, and his niece Marian had become a nun. The very existence of the trail network was profoundly threatened.

In the spring of 1910, following Edmands’ death, Laban Watson’s son-in-law, Randolph Selectman John H. Boothman, "proposed and urged the formation of some agency to put the paths in order."20 The Randolph Mountain Club was founded that August, "its object to promote the enjoyment of Randolph’s forests and mountains; its first task to restore the trails." Its first president was Gray Knob’s owner, the theologian Edward Y. Hincks. Its officers and 131 members, many already active in the AMC, were for the most part summer residents, either guests at the hotels or owners of vacation cottages that had recently sprung up in the valley and on the hill.

The RMC began the process of reopening trails with both volunteer labor from Club members, and hired woodsmen paid from members’ dues. Charles Torrey wrote on August 24, 1910:

Up via Randolph Path, with Elmer Wilson (of Gorham). Hot. Got Wilson started, at Cold Brook, in his work of clearing out and repairing the path (first work of the Randolph Mt. Club); then came up to the Cabin with supplies. Down again, after lunch, to join Wilson.

By 1911 most of the major paths had been cleared. The RMC took over many trails in the Randolph area, clearing them annually; by 1912 Cutter estimated that the Club controlled 40 miles of trail.21 The new Club was already significant enough to receive notice in a Boston Evening Transcript column on July 6, 1912, entitled "The Mountaineer" (only a portion is quoted here):

The Randolph Mountain Club...further reports the clearing of the paths on the northern peaks and ridges of the Presidential Range...Writes Mr.[Eldredge] Blood, "I have had a good crew at work all last week, the Mountain View, Mount Crescent and Ravine Houses each furnishing men"...Work has been begun the present week on the link between Lowe's Path and Cascade Path, impassable for seven or eight years on account of the lumbering. This was a graded path built about 1892 by J. Rayner Edmands. The lumbering has left an enormous amount of slash in the path, treetops thrown one on another like jackstraws, so that the clearing of it will be a very heavy piece of work. Mr. Cutter states that the ungraded extension of the link to the Castellated Ridge is ruined by the lumbering and probably it could not now be traced.22

The Randolph Mountain Club was operating at full steam.

Many thanks to Carol and Eric Sandin for allowing me to reprint George Flagg's great sketch, "The Curse of the Mountains." I am actively seeking any additional comments, corrections, anecdotal materials, or relevant photographs that my readers might have. Please contact me at 111 Amherst Road, Pelham, MA 01002; (413)256-6950; or by E-mail.

Judith Hudson has been coming to Randolph since the age of four or five. Her parents, the Drs. Stephen and Charlotte Maddock, first visited Randolph in 1923 or 1924 at the invitation of the Cutter family. Active members of the RMC, Judy and her husband Al have served in a variety of RMC jobs, including the presidency. Al is currently the Club’s Archivist, and Judy is working on a history of the RMC.

Footnotes:

1 My account here is drawn from the introductions of two works: C. Francis Belcher, Logging Railroads of the White Mountains, Boston: AMC, 1980 and David Dobbs & Richard Ober, The Northern Forest, White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 1995. A volume by Iris Baird, Looking Out for Our Forests, just published in 2005 by Baird Backwoods Construction Publications of Lancaster, NH, has improved the accuracy of my chronology.

2 Belcher, p. 4.

3 Joseph B. Walker, The Forests of New Hampshire, Manchester, April 5, 1883, pp. 15-16.

4 Walker, 1883, p. 29 footnote.

5 Cook wrote of this in the AMC's journal: "New Paths in Randolph," Appalachia: 4; 86 (Dec 1884).

6 Published as the frontispiece to volume 3 of Appalachia in April 1884.

7 RMC, Guide to the Cultural and Natural History of the Four Soldiers Path, "Local Logging History".

8 Francis Blake, "Path from the Glen House to Mt. Madison," Appalachia: 7; 87 (Feb 1893).

9 Mountain Summers, ed. by Peter Rowan and June Hammond Rowan, Gorham, NH: Gulfside Press, 1995, p.252.

10 Belcher, pp. 98-103. Belcher carefully researched the year of the first Zealand fire, which is often placed in 1888, and determined from newspaper accounts that it occurred in 1886, though he gives the start of the fire as "Wednesday, July 8." Marian writes on "Wednesday, July 7," and this is probably correct.

11 The Building of Burnbrae: The Randolph, NH Diaries of George N. Cross, 1897-1899. Randolph History Project, 2005, pp. 38-9, 47.

12 Trustees of Real Estate report, Appalachia: 8; 76 (1896). The AMC donated this property to the White Mountain National Forest in 1937.

13 Cutter, "The Randolph Mountain Club," in George N. Cross, Randolph Old and New, Randolph, NH: Town of Randolph, 1924, p. 177-8.

14 This, and all subsequent passages from the Spur Cabin's logbook are taken from the RMC's publication, Spur Cabin Registers 1900-1915, Randolph Mountain Club Archive, 2004.

15 Joseph B. Walker, The White Mountain Region, Address to the American Forestry Association at Plymouth, NH, August 24, 1894, pp 9-11.

16 Appalachia: 7;182-3 (December 1893).

17 Appalachia: 10;197 (May 1903).

18 Appalachia: 10; 326 (1904).

19 Frederick W. Kilbourne, Chronicles of the White Mountains, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916, pp. 386-401.

20 Cutter, "The RMC," in Randolph Old and New, p.179.

21 Cutter, "The RMC," p.182. The trails were within 5 miles of the Ravine House. The AMC cleared 34 miles, and another 35 were maintained by individuals or hotels.

22 Thanks to Edith Tucker for contributing this old clipping to the RMC's archive!