Ernie Brooks got his men out and rolling well before dawn at his Mud Lake lumber camp deep in the Adirondacks. A longtime lumberman from Speculator in Hamilton County, Brooks logged near hermit French Louie’s remote West Canada Lake camp (see Adirondack Hermits: Solitary Life in the Northwoods, in Northern Woodlands, Winter 2015). Spruce logs needed to be skidded down to the landing where they would be loaded on waiting sleds. Horses with cleated shoes pulled the logs 3 miles along the iced over haul road to the banking grounds at Cedar Lakes, where logs were stacked and stamped on the ends with a cross identifying them as the property of Union Bag and Paper Company.
About the first week in May, the ice would go out of Cedar Lakes and the dam at the outlet was opened to allow a good flow of water to build up in the Cedar River. Then, the boom at the dam would be cut loose, sending the logs on their run down the river. Thirty miles after leaving Cedar Lakes, the logs would pour into the Hudson River. If the water was running good – deep and fast – in the big river, then another 74 miles and two or three days later, Ernie Brooks’ logs would reach the Big Boom just above Glens Falls.
Log driving on the upper Hudson began in 1813 when brothers Norman and Alanson Fox drove logs out of the Brant Lake Tract down the Schroon River and into the Hudson to the mill of their partner, Abraham Wing, at Glens Falls. The idea caught on, and soon many companies were driving logs on the Hudson, resulting in considerable confusion – and, likely, pirating of logs.
In 1849, the Hudson River Boom Association was formed to find a solution. One result was the creation of the Big Boom on the river, just above Glens Falls, as a means of sorting the logs as they came down the river. The Boom consisted of heavy, hewn timbers chained together and running from shore to shore with a plank walkway on top. Logs were distributed through channels to their respective mill owners at Glens Falls and a couple of miles downstream. All logs were stamped in the woods with the owners’ marks and identified in that way at the Big Boom.
Logs were scaled differently on the upper Hudson than anywhere else. The standard, called a “market,” was a log 13 feet, 4 inches long and 19 inches in diameter at the small end and containing about 200 board feet. Logs bigger or smaller were scaled as multiples or fractions of a market. The peak year for the Big Boom was 1872 when 1,069,000 markets passed the Boom. In 1859, the Big Boom broke in spring flooding, sending a half-million logs downriver.
One of the early loggers on the upper Hudson was Jones Ordway, who arrived at Glens Falls in 1833 from Strafford, Vermont, carrying all of his possessions on his back. He soon became one of the top oxen teamsters in the North Country, going on to log much of Township 34 around Blue Mountain Lake.
Ordway banked his logs on what was then called 34 Flow – now Lake Durant – and stamped them with the numeral 34. When he died in 1890, he left an estate of $500,000. His monument at a Glens Falls cemetery is a 40-foot-tall marble column, perhaps representing those big white pines he was cutting around Blue Mountain Lake.
In those days, loggers cut only trees larger than 12 inches on the stump – white pines up to 6 feet in diameter, and red spruce up to 4 feet. Big trees were more profitable because they required less handling to move them from the woods to the mill.
In addition to the Cedar, rivers including the Sacandaga, Indian, Boreas, and Schroon added their spring runoff to the Hudson. The Cedar and Schroon rivers were tame compared to the Boreas – called Boris by locals – which was rough all the way down from Boreas Ponds. The Hudson was always wild water at Ord Falls below Newcomb and then again below the Blue Ledges at a place called the Deer Den.
Driving logs depended mostly on a good current, but loggers on the shore with pike poles and peaveys tried to keep the logs moving and not hanging up. It was dangerous work. Many river drivers met their demise in the whitewater, including Russ Carpenter who smashed his jam boat – or bateau – at the Deer Den and disappeared under a mass of churning logs. Months later, and 30 miles downstream, some children spotted red cloth amid river debris. It was Carpenter’s bandana, still tied around his neck.
On long stillwaters such as along the Blackwell Stillwater on the Hudson, a few of the more skilled rivermen, wearing “corks” or hobnail boots, would ride a single log downstream using their pike poles for balance, in order to avoid walking a rocky or snow-covered shoreline. Those not so nimble afoot would make a “cooter” by tying a couple of logs together with rope or the wispy branches of a beech.
On some rivers the men slept in tents, but on the Hudson there were 40-foot-long lean-tos with campfires burning across the front to give the men a chance to dry out, and a large pot of beans with a ham added on the fire to provide sustenance. With the rough and cold conditions of early spring it was not unusual for men to develop rheumatism at a relatively young age.
The log drives slowed down and ended in the late 1940s when trucks began hauling sawlogs and pulpwood. Now, 200 years after the log drives began, the Whitewater Derby, a nationally known canoe and kayak racing competition begun in 1958, is held on the Hudson River above North Creek each spring to celebrate the lumberjacks and rivermen who for 100 years drove logs down the wild and turbulent upper Hudson to the Big Boom at Glens Falls.