“The early explorers were in search of gold, but they found trees; and the earliest exports from the New World to the Old World were products of the forest. Such products have continued for more than four hundred years to be of conspicuous importance.”
This quote is taken from History of the Lumber Industry of America, Volume 2, by James Elliott Defebaugh (1906), U. of Toronto Open Library. It introduces the concept that wealth generation from natural resources lies at the core of Canada.
We are indeed “Hewers of wood and drawers of water“; meant to be workers at menial tasks, in its original context in Joshua 9:21 …Then Joshua called for them and spoke to them, saying, “Why have you deceived us, saying, ‘We are very far from you,’ when you are living within our land? “Now therefore, you are cursed, and you shall never cease being slaves, both hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God.”
To the Township of Westmeath it did not mean cursed slavery but vast opportunity. You work with what you have; and the early pioneers had a land with trees, and lots of them – enough to build an economy.
Every early township family had members who participated in the lumbering industry in some manner. Two local Upper Ottawa Valley Timber Barons, Alex Fraser and George Bryson, were early big employers and their ranks were augmented by other barons from the City of Ottawa and area, who were operating in the Upper Ottawa Valley all through the river’s large drainage basin. This was extremely dangerous work and local newspapers every week had new stories of calamity.
Alan Soucie has produced two short videos: Horse Logging and Squaring Timber, worth a viewing.
World events far away from the affairs of Eastern Ontario, aligned in such a way that the Lumbering Industry began here and quickly grew into a major force for economic development.
Two major historic events on the world stage, led to the growth of the industry in Canada:
The beauty and promise of the developing Ottawa Valley, although not all surveyed, lead one enthralled visitor, W.H. Smith, one of the earliest of “almanac-ers” to write:
At first the timbers were usually individually driven down the tributaries of the Ottawa and then assembled into cribs of about 25 logs on the main river. Westmeath Township, surrounded on three sides by the Ottawa had its huge white pine taken out to the river and left on the ice awaiting spring breakup.
The fortunes of communities all along the Ottawa River were fastened to the lumber industry. The companies had power as the biggest employers and politicians of all stripes worked to keep the gears of industry turning.
In John D. Dunfield’s “200 Years of Lumbering in the Ottawa Valley“, he writes:
At Quebec City, the timber were sold by their owners to merchants working on behalf of British interests and in many cases rafts were left until the following year because of poor markets and low prices. Many owners went into receivership because of these conditions.
During the 1899’s most of the square timbers were loading onto sailing ships through trap doors in the bow with the aid of a block and tackle while coal burning ships later loaded the timbers over the decks into their holds. In some years there were inventories of 40 million cubic feet of squared timbers and if it were sawn into lumber of one-inch in thickness and 12 inches in width the product would circumvent the world three times or produce 75,000 miles of boards.
It is difficult to understand the scale of the enterprise the lumbering industry had grown to in those early years. Charlotte Whitton in her book for the Gillies Brothers “A Hundred Years A-Fellin’, 1842-1942″, writes:”
“The Renfrew Mercury, July 7, 1871, reported thirteen rafts of 1173 cribs (containing 1,806,950 cubic feet of timber) as running through the Chaudière slide at Ottawa, in four days at the end of June. Ottawa City’s seven ills produced lumber values at $1,564,000 with nearly 1200 men working, and the census divisions of Prescott, Lanark and Renfrew on the Ontario side and of Ottawa on the Quebec side, were in the first rank of all census divisions in Canada in one or other aspects of timber and lumber production. By 1874, the cut in the Valley was 25,000,000 cubic feet of square timber and 423,750 board feet of sawn lumber and deals.” (A deal was a plank of 2 or 3 inches in thickness.)
The raft was a coupling of many cribs and it required squared sticks of equal length, thus resulting in this being a very wasteful use of the forest resource, as so much was left behind to be fuel for the next forest fire. The geometry of the raft has been well described by this excerpt from Charlotte Whitton’s book for the Gillies Brothers “A Hundred Years A-Felling’, 1842-1942, now out of print, but available in used book stores or in libraries. This writer has not seen a better description of the anatomy of a squared timber raft.
The Dominion Government applauded the role that the timber trade played in the country’s development, seeing it as the avenue for a new immigrant to gain a foothold; as stated in this 1886 Government publication taken from Charlotte Whitton’s “A Hundred Years A-Fellin’, 1842-1942”.
An Overview of the Logging Industry: Logging in the Ottawa Valley – The Ottawa River and the Lumber Industry.
The following 6 photographs are submitted by Edgar White whose father and uncle, as young Westmeath lads, were jobbers in the lumber camps.
The township still has lumbering operations, run as small businesses. Many residents own a small woodlot so they can saw their own lumber on a small scale or prepare for the coming winter by logging enough wood for the wood stove or wood furnace of the house. One small sawmill operator was John Bromley of Bromley Line. John Bromley Saw Mill
No recounting of Westmeath History is complete without reading Evelyn Moore Price’s 1984 chapter on Lumbering in History of the Corporation of Westmeath Township. Her description of the process of preparing a “stick” can’t be beat. Alex Fraser established the Fraser Farm just upriver from the Village of Westmeath, not his son W.H.A. For more detail on the Frasers, see that entry in the Family Registry or in Timber Baron Alex Fraser.
What follows is a compilation of articles or photos of lumbering, all with a Westmeath Township & Area perspective.
“Lumbering was the chief industry in the early days. The big pines were hewn, squared and made into rafts to be floated down the river. The river was a hive of industry in the spring, when rafts of lumber from Pembroke and points above, were floated down the river, through the numerous rapids. The Cribs were separated to run the rapids, then put together again and towed over the calm water. The steamboat “Pembroke” towed the rafts of timber from Mellon’s Boom to the head of the small rapids at the old Fort Coulonge, where if they were separated into cribs again and floated through the swift water to the foot of Calumets Island, where they were towed by another boat, and so on, till they reached Quebec, where the timber was loaded on a boat for overseas, mostly Britain.
Letters patent issued to the old Pembroke Navigation Co. Incorporated in 1897. The document was entirely hand-written.”
