Roy Amey grew up on a farm in Pittsburg, New Hampshire’s northernmost town. He learned to work hard at a young age and has spent much of his adult life working in or near the woods. He and his wife Laurel Amey own R & L Trucking, a logging and trucking company they built up from a single truck and trailer in 1974 into a booming business. They also own Maple Ridge Farm in Pittsburg, and over the years, Roy has also sugared, loaded and trucked Christmas trees, and run a mulch grinding operation. At age 70, and only a few months from a trucking accident that left him badly injured, Amey has no plans to retire. Much of the Ameys’ land is in a conservation easement, so – as Roy says – others, now and in the future, can enjoy the beauty of a place he and many others hold dear.
I was born in 1951 and I remember very plainly being 5 years old and up and doing everything we did – farming and sugaring and working our heart out. We grew up on a farm on Tabor Road, just up from the cemetery. Every one of us got a pitchfork when we were 5, and that pitchfork meant following the swaths of hay and turning it over. One time, my father hired somebody to pile up a whole bunch of square bales. Then we got two weeks of rain. We had to cut the strings and take the bales and shake the hay all the way out over the field to dry again. Back then you had to have every single piece of whatever there was to get by. We had a barn full of cows to feed.
There was nine of us children, my mother and father, and a hired man who this was the only home he ever had. He was born in Canada but lived here until the day he died. He did a lot of haying, mowing, a lot of pitchforking. And a lot of swearing. That’s how we all learned to swear, every one of us. My mother cooked everything in great big dishes on the woodstove, and it went around the table. You didn’t turn your nose up, you didn’t ask what it was. If you knew anything at all, you filled your plate, because when it came around the next time, it might be empty. My mother did a man’s work seven days a week, between the garden, the cooking, and coming to the barn.
We had over 100 head of cattle and heifers. My father had between 60 and 70 sheep. The wool from the sheep paid for the taxes. He raised hogs, and in the fall during butchering, we all knew what our job was – some was to scrape, and some was to haul hot water, and some was to put the rosin on. He sold a lot of meat that went to the logging crews. In my lifetime I raised pigs and sold the meat to the logging crews in Errol and that area. We also had a sugar camp, and we had to walk a mile to the sugarhouse up over the hill on snowshoes. My father would sleep in the sugar camp and do the boiling, and we would do all the gathering every night after school.
We didn’t have any alcohol, any tobacco, but if our parents took off and we had a tractor we could get going, we’d find somewhere to go. I remember one town meeting day, it was very warm. We took a farm tractor out and run it up and down the town roads and drove it all to hell. I remember someone coming down, and they were pissed, but we ran and hid so they didn’t find us. That’s the kind of fun we had.
I still get up at 4 o’clock in the morning. I’ve done it all my life. Since my accident last fall, some days I struggle. Some days are perfect. I am better, but I’m fortunate to be alive. I was in the hospital for three days and laid up for three months. It was the end of January before I started trucking, and it hurt me awful, just the rough roads, but I was just happy to be in the truck and hauling wood, be in the woods and doing stuff. That’s how I’ve spent my whole life. Other than working construction for Perini in ’68/69 to ’72, that’s all I’ve done is work the woods and on this land base 99 percent of the time. Once in the while, I’ll be in Vermont, but normally I’m here in Pittsburg.
I farmed right up until 1968 and then I worked for the state, but I didn’t like that, so that lasted just one summer. Then I worked for Perini in the summers. I got married very young, in 1970. I’d had my fill of farming, because we’d worked so hard. We couldn’t go anywhere. That’s all we did. We never learned to swim. We never went to town. I never knew what the town of Pittsburg looked like until I went on bus the first time I went to school.
I bought an old truck and an old trailer, and I ran that for five years. Thirteen rear ends broke on that piece of shit. I didn’t have any money. It broke every day, but somehow I made it. The mills all closed down when we had the fuel embargo, and I made two loads that summer. But I had learned to do body work in the springtime from Washman Lumber Company, so they took me in, and I did a lot of painting and fixing old trucks and changing fenders, and Laurel took a job in the nursing home.
A few years after I started, I bought a brand-new beautiful truck for $53,000. Then I bought more, and I’ve ended up with 10 trucks and 10 trailers. I hauled a lot of bagged and powdered cement from Quebec City. One summer, when the logging was down, all 10 trucks were hauling cement. I was doing all the mechanic work. I’d make a trip to Quebec City once a week myself. I did very well. Then the place in Quebec City went on strike at the same time logging opened up again. At that time, I had three skidders, a crane, and I did woods jobs everywhere and loaded pulp all over the area – from Lancaster, New Hampshire, to Errol to Norton, Vermont – everyplace anyone had a load of wood. I did that for years. At that time, I didn’t have many cows.
Back then we went into Berlin weighing 135,000 pounds. Now Berlin is closed. We can’t even go to Jay anymore because it blew up. But now I come out of the woods all winter with a nice truck and a brand new Manac trailer. The truck and trailer weighs 36,000 pounds empty. That’s quite a difference in how they’ve made equipment lighter.
I owned the Amey Logging Yard for 42 years, until we sold it about four years ago. I did log grading and sorting and all kinds of stuff there, plus the grinding of mulch. I sent out hundreds and hundreds of yards of mulch. I did Christmas trees, started in 1983. My best year was 56 loads of Christmas trees. I had nine trailers, nine trucks that did the trucking.
I still truck and I move wood and I load wood some. I guess my heart is in farming, although I love the woods. From where I’m sitting now, I’m looking at a frontend loader, a backhoe, a big excavator, a small excavator, a 4-axel dump truck, a low bed, forks, bucket, chip box, and I’m also selling a big amount of round hay bales. The biggest thing in the woods, why I got done cutting and having skidders – you had to walk the lines, you had to walk the property. And I can’t be alone in the woods. I struggle to do my own farm fence. There’s something in me that I just don’t like to be alone.
We have 30 head of beef cows, two horses, chickens, and two goats I didn’t want – they look cute, but they grow big and they’re a nuisance. I sell a lot of hay. Last year I sold nine trailer loads of hay, 40 bales per load. I won’t retire. I might slow down a little bit only when I have to. Right now I’m not going to. I do close out with the excavator. I’ll be farming. I’ll be haying.
I go back a lot of years. In the past, we didn’t have good logging practices, and they’ve come miles and miles and miles now to improve it. Before they had foresters marking every tree, there was a lot of butchering and some places haven’t come back, and there was erosion because they didn’t do closures. The foresters now pay a lot of attention to what the ground looks like and what the water looks like and the mud. I can remember when there was so much shit coming down the river from washouts where they’d logged too close or got brooks riled up. It was just a mess. It’s very important that these foresters do what they’re doing, because the sun is hotter, things are changing. I see a big difference in the water supply – last year was the first year in my life I had to turn the water off in the barn. There was not enough water for the spring to support it.
I give the foresters a lot of credit now for what they do. Closing out the land after a logging job is very important. A skidder goes up and down the hill. They go in the same rut to get to the top of the hill. When they get done, that rut is five or six feet deep, and the water runs right down those ruts. So you go to the top of the hill and you switch that water so it can run sideways and slowly. You make water bars, shape them, pack them. That keeps that water from running several hundred feet or maybe a mile and all that erosion that would go down to the river and choke up some place else.
I have 285 acres of meadowland and woodland, and we put a conservation easement on it. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t logged off completely. I wanted to make sure there weren’t building lots on the hill. When you’re up on the hill, you look right over this valley, look right up Lake Francis here in Pittsburg. It’s just a beautiful view. I built a nice road up there that goes right over to the Hall Stream side that overlooks East Hereford, Quebec. My daughter and son-in-law own 300 acres there and have a beautiful view of the Hall Stream side. We also own about 1,700 acres of forestland in Guildhall, Vermont.
I mow a bit early in the spring for a nice road that goes to the river. There’s a nice brook that goes down through my land, it’s Amey Brook. There’s a parking area down on Route 3 on the Amey Log Yard – I put that right-of-way in the conservation easement. The community has access to the land and the river, and I just hope anyone who uses it is respectful to the property.
I thought people ought to have a chance to look and enjoy everything that I’ve been looking at all these years, and that I’ve made look a lot better. I like everything to look nice. When you’re out in my field, you look right out through Tabor Notch. Indian Stream Valley is a big bowl. Everywhere you look, it’s a ridge all around you. How come the world can’t be happy? It’s beautiful. When you’re in the field and you’re mowing, you’re baling – you look around, you enjoy what you’re seeing.
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