By: Sharp Swan
This blog is inspired by the Logging the High Peaks exhibit, featured at the Adirondack History Museum in 2024. Viewing of this exhibit will be extended for the 2025 season. For more information about visiting and becoming a member, please visit our website at www.adkhistorymuseum.org - We hope to see you in May 2025!
Logging the Adirondack High Peaks presented some enormous challenges. The steep terrain, up to 45 degrees, and high elevations, sometimes over 4000 feet, made getting timber off the rocky slopes difficult, dangerous, and life-threatening.
Three Companies principally logged the High Peaks from 1889 to 1925. Two, the J & J Rogers Company out of Ausable Forks and Finch Pruyn located in Glen Falls were looking for the four-foot pulp logs for their paper mills, and one, the Santa Clara Logging Company, headquartered in Tupper Lake, cut 13-foot logs for their sawmill.
For 35 years, these three companies set their sights on the highest timber in New York State. After the easier lower landscape along the edges of the High Peaks had been cut, these timber companies turned their focus on what initially seemed impossible to log around the last decade of the 19th Century.
In the end, they mastered the dangers and logistics of this difficult terrain and were able to log within a half mile of New York’s highest peak, Mount Marcy, and to 3,820 feet on Mount Seymour, a 4,120-foot summit in the Seward Range. Fortunately, New York State acquired the timbered eastern slopes of the MacIntyre Range and Mount Redfield by Eminent Domain, thus preventing Finch Pruyn from logging the old-growth timber and protecting the forest forever.
With the exception of Finch Pruyn, which continued to log the fringes of the High Peaks, by Elk Lake, Mount Allen, and Boreas Ponds, until about 2010, the other two logging companies ceased operations in the mountains by the mid-1920s. J & J Rogers found cheaper pulp logs by rail from Canada and by 1923 had taken their last logs from under the massive cliff on Big Slide. Santa Clara sold their land to New York State and sledded their final timber off the west side of Mount Donaldson in 1925.
Lumberjacks on the Mountain
In a time before heavy machinery, everything had to be bulled by men and horses and hand tools such as peaveys. Dynamite was the only aid they had to clear new roads of stumps and rocks as well as the log jams on the river drives. The lumberjacks, mostly French Canadiens, labored long hours in the woods cutting down trees in the late summer and fall.
Each five-man lumberjack crew worked to cut and skid either 4-foot pulp logs or the 13-foot timber a couple hundred yards to loading ramps near the sled road. Prior to 1890, lumberjacks could chop an average of 70 trees a day, but with the introduction of the two-man saw, production increased to 160 trees a day for each two-man crew. A lumberjack was paid about $2 a day, minus their room and board; the precise amount depended upon the number of logs stacked at the loading ramps
Peppered throughout the High Peaks, about a mile apart and close to the timber being cut, were the lumber camps. If logs were on site, a camp could be built in 15 days by a ten-man crew and kept dry by a thin layer of tarpaper secured the roof with nails. To get at the higher timber, like in the Seward Range, several camps had to be built as high as 3,200 feet in elevation. Finch Pruyn made a camp near the pass between Redfield and Cliff on the trail to Marcy, also at about 3,200 feet in elevation.
Able to house up to 50 men and a dozen horses, the lumber camps were usually lice-infested, which was somewhat controlled by spraying kerosine in the bunks. The provisions, approximately 1,200 pounds a day, had to be transported to the camps by sled or tote wagon that cut deep ruts into the soil and can still be seen even today.
Sledding & Sluiceways
Getting the logs off the mountains in the High Peaks presented many challenges for the three logging companies. Operating in freezing temperatures, deep snow, and high altitudes, the lumberjacks worked to get the timber stacked by roads in the summer and fall to the banking ground by the river, sometimes five miles away. Sledding usually commenced right after the new year, but sometimes earlier if the snow was deep enough to carry the heavy 10-ton loads.
Santa Clara’s 13-foot-long logs piled high on the upper reaches of Seward and Seymour had to be brought off the mountain in two stages. On the higher sections, smaller horses with lighter loads could only come down the steeper slopes using a brake with a ¾ inch steel cable attached to the back of the sled. By using either a snubber or a Barienger Brake, they could control the speed of the descent. Santa Clara initially tried to use a snubber, essentially a large spool (pictured below), but its portability, as well as losing two horses in Ouluska Pass after the brake failed, convinced them to try the Barienger Brake. This brake, which Santa Clara modified, allowed them to take off all of the timber on the steepest terrain almost to the summits.
Once in the lower, flatter valleys, the upper sleds were off-loaded at a landing and the logs were transferred to the bigger, heavier sleds pulled by draft horses. During the night, a sprinkler wagon trickled water over the track, creating a frictionless road for the sled’s trip to the banking ground. Lumberjacks, called Road Monkeys, kept the sleds from crowding the horses on hills by “guarding” the road with dirt on the track.
Both Finch Pruyn and J & J Rogers used dry chutes dropping their pulp logs by gravity straight off Mount Colden's shoulder and Mount Adams's summit. J & J Rogers was the king of the water sluiceways and had at least five of these, one eight miles long, coming off Whiteface, the Jay Range, and on Spruce Hill, in Keene. J & J Rogers sent their pulp logs down the mountain in these sluiceways, spectacularly emptying into the Ausable River.
J & J Rogers ended their logging of the High Peaks in 1923 when they cut their last timber near the cliffs on Big Slide. Smaller, loaded high-altitude sleds brought the pulp logs down the mountain by chaining several bundling logs together and trailing them behind as a brake. From the landing, the huge sleds came into Keene Valley following sled roads along John’s Brook and depositing their loads along the Ausable River.
River Drivers
Without a doubt, the most dangerous part of getting the logs to the mill was driving the logs down the river. With the drive beginning soon after the river was free of ice and the deep snows in the mountains started to melt, the water usually hovered around 35°. The logs were sometimes mixed with chunks of ice and for a river driver falling into the water with tumbling, churning, and slippery timber was almost assuredly a death sentence. A river driver could either die of hypothermia or be crushed between the logs moving downstream.
Of the three companies, Finch Pruyn, based in Glen Falls, had the longest drive down the Hudson River to get their logs to the mill, about 85 miles away. J & J Rogers sent their pulp logs down both branches of the Ausable River, the logs traveling 36 miles on the West Branch and only 24 on the East Branch. The Santa Clara Lumber Company drove the tributaries of the Raquette River, pushing their 13-foot logs down the Ampersand, Cold, and Moose Rivers. From Duck Hole on the Cold River, the Santa Clara River drivers floated the timber 46 miles to Tupper Lake, but logs on the north side of the Seward range only had to travel 28 miles down the Ampersand to their mill.
Because of the higher altitude and a diminished water supply, all three logging companies needed to supplement their river drives by adding splash dams. These barriers added the necessary water reservoir to help the drivers push the timber down the rivers. Finch Pruyn had dams at Elk Lake, Boreas Ponds, and the Upper Works. Their dam at the Flowed Lands redirected the water past Calamity Pond, keeping the logs from going over Hanging Spear Falls. J & J Rogers had dams at Indian Pass, up in Klondike Notch between Big Slide and Phelps, and famously at Marcy Dam. Santa Clara had six splash dams, their largest one across the Cold River appropriately called “The Big Dam.”
Once the logs began their journey to the mill, they could cover anywhere between a half mile to 5 miles a day, the average being closer to 3. Like a western cattle drive, the crews rode the timber down river pushing the strays off the bank and any that became caught on the rocks in the stream. Cooks followed closely along the shores, providing much-needed sustenance as the river drivers ate more than normal lumberjacks.
For the most part, about 90% of the time, the river drives arrived at the pulp or sawmill without any problems. But there were times when the logs became quickly backed up creating a log jam. The river drivers would for the “key log,” which would be the one log that once it was freed would set the mass of logs moving again. Dynamite was used only as a last resort, as it usually damaged the wood to compensate for the time it saved.
End of the Line
Finch Pruyn’s pulp logs finally arrived after an 85-mile journey at the “Big Boom” outside Glens Falls anywhere from 60 to 80 days after being pushed into the river. The chained boom stopped all the logs from continuing downstream, but for some timber that got hung up in hidden eddies, rocks, it would take up to two years to arrive. In its heyday in 1872, there were 2 million individual logs at the boom totaling 213 million board feet of lumber, but as the amount of timber diminished, only 1.2 billion feet came down the river between 1900 and 1929.
The logs from the Santa Clara river drives ended up at their boom at Tupper Lake. Their timber traveled a shorter distance than those on the Hudson, 46 miles if they used the Cold River tributary, but only 28 if they traveled the Ampersand River.
Just like the Hudson, because other logging companies also ran the rivers, once the logs arrived at the boom, they needed to be sorted. Santa Clara’s shoved their logs toward their huge sawmill directly across the lake, pushing all others further downstream. On the Hudson, Finch Pruyn sorted through the massive mountain of logs directing their own to the pulp mill lying about three miles downstream at Glens Falls. Each company had its own “Log Mark” indented numerous times into both ends by a hammer to distinguish ownership if the different drives got mixed up.
For J & J Rogers, their pulp logs only had to travel by river 36 miles on the West Branch and 24 miles on the East Branch to arrive at their pulp mill just upstream from Ausable Forks. Since the mill rested on the West Branch, timber coming out of the East Branch had to be first drawn out of the water and transported by a large wood conveyor, 76 feet tall, to the pulp facilities less than a mile away.
From the time it took to construct the roads and lumber camps, cutting the timber, sledding, and finally the river drives to the mill, the entire process took more than a year. At its final destination, the timber was used to make paper or sawn boards. Finch Pruyn and J & J Rogers produced paper products used throughout the East Coast. Santa Clara set a world record at the time by sawing a million board feet in a day. A record that left the workers a little chagrined for they got no extra compensation for their labor and worked themselves closer to finishing the job.
Comments