Connecticut River logging and loggers come alive in talk

By GLYNIS HART
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SPRINGFIELD, Vt. — Helen Pike remembers tagging along with her father, author and academic Robert E. Pike, as he drove along the back roads of New Hampshire and Vermont. He had a trunk full of books and her parents’ project was to sell them to local folks who remembered the old log drives on the Connecticut River. 

“Spiked Boots: Sketches of the North Country” was a compendium of legends and stories about the loggers and the log drives, moving the harvested forests of New England south to Hartford, Connecticut. 

“They had the best sales pitch ever,” said Helen. “Here, you’re going to want to buy this book because you’re in it.’ And it worked!” 

Robert Pike was most proud of “Spiked Boots,” although he wrote other books. A polyglot and academic, he had a doctorate from Harvard and taught English at what would later become Monmouth University. Helen grew up in New Jersey, but like her father she felt the pull of New England and eventually settled in Waterford, Vermont. 

On Tuesday she spoke at the Nolin-Murray Center in Springfield, sharing some of the logging lore, and quite a few pictures, with the OLLI audience. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Dartmouth College sponsored her talk. 

Like all good tales, the tale of logging from northern New Hampshire has a villain: George Van Dyke. Van Dyke had a reputation for cheating his men, but a flamboyant personality and a knack for leading by example. He’d go out on the river himself to break up log jams, and he’d help out a former employee who’d fallen on hard times. 

“Uncle Harl (Robert’s brother) worked for George Van Dyke,” recalled Helen Pike.

One of Helen Pike’s slides showed a gravestone. Charles Barber, age 19, drowned in a logging accident at Sumner Falls in Hartland Vermont in 1895. Pike said she’d heard a story Van Dyke gave the young man’s family $300 for his death, but she was skeptical. “We never knew Mr. Van Dyke to give anybody any extra money,” she said. “It turns out it was back pay.” 

The Connecticut River was first the scene of logging camps before the American Revolution, when Great Britain claimed tall trees for the masts of its navy. By 1820, only 20 percent of Connecticut had trees. By 1850 the state was almost completely deforested. 

Asa Smith founded the Connecticut River Lumber Company in 1879 and went north to find more wood: New Hampshire had plenty of trees, and the river was the best way to move them. The company acquired 250,000 acres of forest, producing 40 million feet of logs. “A series of dams was built so when the ice melted it would flood the river and there’d be enough water to wash the logs down,” Helen Pike explained. Every spring the log drives brought the people in the riverside towns out to watch the grand spectacle of thousands of logs jostling down the river, and the brave feats of the men who rode the logs in their spiked boots.

Smith resigned after four years at the head of the company and was succeeded as president by George Van Dyke. Later Smith sued Van Dyke and four other men for altering company records and issuing fraudulent stock to themselves.

By the turn of the century, the forests were denuded and a new use for all those dams had presented itself: hydropower. In 1906 the first hydropower dam was built in Vernon, Vermont and the power companies began to buy dams and designated places where they could capture the power of the river for a regional electric grid. 

In 1909, George Van Dyke and his driver died in a freak accident. Van Dyke, who had possibly suffered a stroke the year before, had given up rolling logs but still liked to supervise his operations personally. After watching the men moving logs at Turner Falls, Massachusetts, Van Dyke told his driver to take him back to the hotel. However, the car lurched forward instead of back, and the two men were propelled over a 75-foot cliff. Shorty, the driver, died instantly, Van Dyke a few hours later. 

By 1915 the day of the loggers had passed. The Connecticut River Lumber Company announced it would hold one last drive; there was $2.9 million worth of timber still standing on company land. Many of the old loggers gathered for that last drive, including two who had been in the first one in 1869.  

“You can still find people in Upper Waterford who put people up [for the log drives],” said Pike. 

She ended her talk with a plea to the audience: “Any of you who have these stories, please write them down. Somebody will want them. Pair with a student who needs a capstone project to get it down. We need these stories to complete the picture.”