B A C K   T H E N

 

Early 1900s. Early morning on the Penobscot at the Argyle boom, several miles north of Milford. The steamer Tosca is arriving from Costigan with batteaus
carrying “runners” with their rafting hawsers. The steam scow to the left is the Mary Jane Carr. The white motorboat dates the photo. The ends of two “swings” of rafted logs, lying to buoys, appear at right.

The Penobscot, or Old Town, boom was the river’s principal sorting and rafting boom. Its log-guiding sheer booms, trip booms, sorting booms, rafting grounds, storage areas, shore sites, buildings, piers, and so forth extended about ten miles. Chartered in 1825, it was managed by an association of lumbermen. The many island privileges involved in the operation were leased from the Penobscot Indians. Argyle, lying between White Squaw Island and the western bank, was the chief sorting, rafting, and scaling boom.

The system used here, similar to those used elsewhere, was imported from the Androscoggin in 1832. Logs were sorted according to ownership, as indicated by the various axe-cut “dog tracks,” of which over 200 were registered. Sorting was done by “checkers,” who worked either directly atop the logs while holding onto a line stretched across the water, or from small anchored rafts.

The sorted logs were assembled into small rafts called “joints” along the mile-long “rafting ground.” Joints, held together by light rope secured by driven crotched, hardwood wedges, were assembled into long “swings.” Twice a day, steamers arrived with the “runners,” who, working from batteaus, assembled new swings reflecting log purchases. These, strung by heavy hawser, were joined into long tows. As tows passed along the bank, joints were cut off and moored to trees at the shore sites leased by their respective purchasers.

Rafts of logs destined for the great sawmills on the Stillwater River and for the down-river steam mills were broken up, and the logs driven. Logs for the steam mills were rafted again at the Bangor boom—the drive from Argyle to Bangor was sixteen miles long, passed over five dams, and took eight days with good water. Rafts for Milford mills were navigated through the Sunkhaze Rips and Jo Pease Rips by mill crews using long sculls.

Booming was big business. Work began before ice-out and lasted to freeze-up. Miles of chained log booms had to be “hung” every spring and stored in coves, or hauled up streams for the winter. The 126 rock and timber piers often required repairs from ice damage. Eighty tons of cordage were used in a season.

Unsold logs were shingled up on the banks for the winter.

The drives began arriving in May. Large dormitories were maintained, and the hundreds of workers ate huge amounts of food. The banner year was 1872, with 217 million feet. The crews were then mostly Irish, and when Frenchmen were brought in to help, the Irish precipitated two attacks. The Frenchmen reportedly gave the Irish “a bad caulking,” and stayed. When the big East and West Branch drives arrived together in August 1888, along with the Sebois drive, 80 million feet of logs choked five miles of river, and sorting and rafting went on at Nebraska, Argyle, and Pea Cove booms. Four hundred twenty-five men were employed, along with many boys. In the early 1900s perhaps a third of the 200 to 250 hands were boys aged ten to fourteen—boys were cheap, quick, and naturally amphibious.

The early 1900s were a time of strife and change, with a festering struggle for control between the old down-river interests and the rising corporate giant at Millinocket, the Great Northern Paper Company. Although many of the logs from 1901 were lost to ice and freshet, the remainders swelled the total rafted at Argyle in 1902 to 142 million feet. By 1930, however, the Penobscot boom was all but done.

In 1904, Bangor Citizens, petitioning for improved filtration of drinking water, identified the hundreds of men and boys who practically lived on the Old Town booms as one source of the city’s high typhoid rate.

Shoal and rustic little steamers ran early on the Penobscot between Old Town and Lincoln. Beginning with the California gold rush, a number of such boats were shipped to the West Coast, South America, and elsewhere. In 1885 the Old Town firm of Carlton & Wallace was still building pre-fabricatedsteamboats for California.

Text by William H. Bunting from A Days Work, Part 2, A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs, 1860–1920, Part II. Published by Tilbury House Publishers, Gardiner, Maine. 800-582-1899

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