''Woodhick'' was a common term for loggers .
I never meant for my article on the Williamsport Lumber Boom to turn into so many sections, but I found it impossible to fit it all into one post.
There were four steps to this early logging business:
- The Felling Of The Trees - Beginning In August. "for fall is the best to fell trees, as every lumberman knows"
- The Skidding Of The Trees - In the winter, the trees would be drug on skids or sleds, and often sent down steep hills in chutes. This was easiest to do in the winter snows.
- The Log Drives - The logs were then floated, often one after another, down smaller streams to larger streams, lakes, or ponds, where they would be bound and built into rafts
- Rafting The River
If you hike and bike to the north of Williamsport at all, you might be familiar with the Old Loggers Trail. Or maybe the ghost towns along the pine creek rail trail? And Rickets Glen. The town of Rickets, shown above, was built around a lumber camp. (The ghost town today is not part of the actual park, but rather about four miles north of the Lake Jean entrance to Ricketts Glen State Park on Rt. 487) These are all leftovers of the logging era. Those towns sprung up around lumber mills,or they are references to a logging camp. There were, many, many lumber camps, all over the mountains of Pennsylvania. And especially, in the area north of the former "Lumber Capitol Of the World", Williamsport.
Lumber companies built logging camps within their claimed tract of timber. The Camps would contain a bunkhouse, a stable, a shed for storing tools, and a blacksmith shop.
Bunks were merely wooden shelves, built one above another, and the loggers slept on
straw ticks. In the center of the bunkhouse there was an open fire with a hole in the roof to let the smoke escape.Later, when hemlock lumbering began, much better camps were built. They were built two stories high, eighteen feet wide and from forty to ninety feet long. Upstairs three rows of beds reached the entire length of the camp, with woven spring beds. Down stairs was the lobby at one end ... which varied in size, ...being the width of the camp and from sixteen to twenty-four feet long. The rest of the downstairs was the dining room
Large iron kettles were provided where men could heat water on Sundays to wash their
clothes. If a man thought he needed a bath in warm weather he hunted up a hole in the creek. In cold weather he had to go either to town or home to get a bath.
The mess hall contained a long plank table and plank seats. The kitchen might be at one end of the mess hall, or it might be an adjoining structure.
Generally, the men in lumber camps were treated fair. " In the hemlock woods the men had a powerful weapon, "the red-horse let loose in the slashing" (Fire). If the company foreman tried to cheat a man, the man would reach in his pocket, get a nickel,hold it up and look the foreman in the eye and say, "that will buy a box of matches!" This would bring a satisfactory settlement. In 1893 Goodyear paid his contractors and some of them absconded without paying their men. Goodyear wouldn't pay the men their bark-peeling wages. Fire broke out all over his slashing in Big Moore Run in Potter Co., Pa. In vain Goodyear offered four dollars per day for firefighters. The men jeered him. Helplessly he watched a million dollars go up in smoke. " - Reminisces of H.M. Cramner
The Lumber Camp Jobs
Crews varied from ten men to two hundred men. Foremen were usually men past forty years of age and not only experienced woodsmen but [ones] having the gift of handling a crew of men. Men did not care to work under a boss who was less than thirty years old.
"A man wasn't considered a good woodsman unless he had worked in more than one state. In the pine wood days of the 1870s and 1880s men from Pennsylvania used to go to Michigan, Wisconsin and to a less extent Minnesota to work for a year or two just to become a seasoned woodsman. This was started by roaring Jack Bell, a pine cutting contractor, who when he quit jobbing in Pennsylvania moved on [to] Wisconsin, taking a hundred of his men with him. Later in the 1890s and later men from Pennsylvania used to go to West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and other southern states where lumbering was going on, just to work awhile and see the country. After 1900 company s paid the train fare for woodsmen if they would go to Oregon and Washington and stay a year. Two years and they would pay their fare back east again. It was a common thing in a hemlock camp of sixty men to find men that had worked from the Adirondack mountains to Georgia and on the Pacific Coast, in the big timber." - Reminiscences of A Pennsylvania Wood Hick
Wood-cutters were Bohunks, as men from Austria-Hungary were called, and no self respecting wood-hick would cut wood.
A "wood-hick" (lumberjack) wore calked shoes, overalls with the bottoms cut off so they wouldn't catch in the calks, in the summertime a woolen undershirt, no outside shirt. Wool was a protection against sunburn and catching cold when caught in a shower. In the winter a heavy outside woolen overshirt was worn. -Reminiscences of A Pennsylvania Wood Hick
Civil War days. Men were scarce, because of the war, so when A. P. Roberts, was jobbing here, cutting pine logs, he brought one hundred men from Nova Scotia to work for him. Two-thirds of them had the last name of Hicks, so they were called "Robert's Hicks". Soon a man working in the pine woods was called a "hick". When they began to cut the hemlock all woodsmen were called "hicks" and a town with a sawmill a "hick-town".
At the blacksmith shop, horses had to be shod, broken chains mended, canthooks sharpened, sled runners repaired, and so on.
Some sawmills hired a doctor, each man paying a dollar a month for doctor services.
Choppers and sawyers were what their names imply. Once a tree was prostrate, it had to be shorn of its limbs. These either had to be sawed into logs or dragged out of the way-depending upon their size.
The bark was run down hill by gravity in bark chutes. A bark chute was two ten inch boards sixteen feet long nailed together forming a trough down which the bark slid to the bottom of the hill. The height of a hill was gauged by the number of bark-chutes it took to reach from bottom to top. - Reminiscences of A Pennsylvania Wood Hick
Before logs could be skidded, swampers made rude trails, removing obstructing rocks and roots, or bending the trail around them. Originally, oxen were used to haul logs. Later, horses furnished the motive power.
"The very largest and finest pine trees were cut for spars, that is ship masts. They were 80 to 100 feet long and required 8 to 14 horses to haul them to the river."
A splash dam was a temporary wooden dam used to raise the water level in creeks and streams, to float logs downstream to river, or sawmills.
By impounding water and allowing it to be released on the log drive's schedule, these dams allowed many more logs to be brought to market than the natural flow of the creek allowed.
"Second was the splash-dam builder. He built wooden dams twenty or thirty feet high out of logs built in cob-work or log house style with the upper side slopped at a forty-five degree angle.
The dam was unfilled, just logs crisscrossed with board sheeting on the upper side. The water held it in place. To keep it from undermining, hemlock or spruce boughs were placed on the bottom on the upper side, covered with gravel, then the gravel covered with earth.
A Splash Dam on Otter Run in Lycoming County
The gate to a standard dam was sixteen feet six inches wide and twelve feet high. Alongside was a smaller gate half as wide.
As the water fell six inches when the big gate was open the smaller gate was raised twelve inches. This kept the artificial flood, called a "splash", at a uniform height.
FOOD
Some of the old time loggers, looking for work, would get to a camp and look in the cook house – if there was a rocking chair in the kitchen, they would move on, as they didn’t think a good cook had time to be sitting in a rocking chair.
The fare was rough but wholesome, and the men consumed enormous quantities of it. At one camp the workers ate one and a half dozen “cackle berries” (eggs), fried hard, each breakfast. Lunch was brought to them in the woods, and often consisted of fat pork and beans.
The rule of the woods meant that a man was never fired while hungry. Any man that was being let go (most commonly because he was too careless) would be told after his evening meal.
The recipe of Elizabeth Taylor Sones, cook at Bachley's Camp on Rock Run
Rivels:
- 1 egg beaten
- Add salt
- Add flour until "crumbly"
Boil: hamburg, potato, onion, carrots. When vegetables are cooked, add rivels. Cook about 10 minutes.
Social Life In The Logging Camps
The Nolan Camp was located where Worlds End State Park Is Today
Sundays were often when photographers would visit the logging camps and take posed photos.
"Evenings, Sundays and rainy days there was always a poker game going in the lobby of the camp, generally a five or ten cent edge but ofttimes a quarter edge. Other card games were 'played for fun, forty-five, seven up, cinch, casino and king-peed.
In warm weather a game of horseshoe pitching after supper was the rule.
Breaking the Jam on Gerry s Rock
In the hemlock camps singing was rare. That belonged to the earlier pine woods when every camp boasted a singer. Songs were composed and sung in the camps of exploits or tragedy. For instance, Breaking the Jam on Gerry s Rock, [told of an incident] where six men and their foreman were drowned -Reminiscences of A Pennsylvania Wood Hick
Lumber Camp Ministry
Frank Higgins, the original lumberjack sky pilot, ministered to the souls of lumberjacks across the United States, including he northern woods of Pennsylvania. . For decades he traveled among the frozen logging camps with his trademark pack of Bibles, hymnals, and Christian literature strapped to his back.
In 1899, Higgins dedicated himself completely to logging camps. Higgins was accepted by lumberjacks because he seemed like one of them. He was physically imposing, and his friends said he occasionally punched men who confronted him. Higgins was well-prepared for the cold winters.
At first, as he traveled across northern Minnesota from camp to camp, he used snowshoes or skies and carried a heavy pack on his back. He later realized that a dog-drawn sled would be easier for hauling his materials. It was also easier for taking injured lumberjacks and pregnant women to the nearest hospital. Higgins and his sled dogs became an iconic image in the North Woods.
Higgins began recruiting new sky pilots from the ranks of converted lumberjacks. The most famous was John Sornberger, a former prize fighter who had become a heavy drinker and murderer. Higgins helped the wanted criminal find God, give up sin, and clean up his life. Higgins even engineered a pardon from Governor John Johnson.
In 1902, Higgins was asked to head a Presbyterian home mission program to logging camps. The camps covered over 200 square miles and included 30,000 men, which was too much for one minister. Higgins began sending other sky pilots on camp circuits.
In 1914, after years of carrying a heavy backpack, Higgins developed a pain in his shoulders that would not go away. It was sarcoma, a form of cancer, and doctors told him it was caused by carrying his pack. He had several operations but passed away on January 4, 1915, at the age of forty-nine.
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READ MORE
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Harvesting the Hemlock: The Reminiscences of a Pennsylvania Wood-Hick
H.M. Cramner, edited by Thomas R. Cox
LUMBERING IN PENN'S WOODS By LEWIS EDWIN THEISS
Higgins A Man's Christian by Norman Duncan
Lumber Camp Recipe - Vinegar Pie
One pie shell
2 eggs
¼ cup of butter
½ cup of white sugar
½ cup of brown sugar
3 Tbsp of vinegar*
1/2 cup of water
¼ cup of flour
Dash of nutmeg to taste
In a large bowl, blend white sugar, brown sugar, flour and nutmeg with fingers until no lumps remain. Stir in vinegar, eggs, butter and water until well mixed. Pour into pie shell and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Or better yet, in a dutch oven over a campfire
* Try a variety of vinegar. Distilled white vinegar may give the pie a taste similar to pecan pie filling (minus the pecans); Apple cider vinegar may give the pie an apple taste. Both of these would be historic adaptations.
