Logging
is as old as human history. Trees are among the most versatile and abundant
natural resources available, and while Native Americans
undoubtedly engaged in minor logging before the European invasion, they were
limited largely by their lack of metal technology. Stone saws have been found
in West Virginia, but they were crude affairs, certainly not something capable
of cutting down a 300-year old oak tree.
It wasn’t too long before the Shavers Fork saw its first mills, which were put in around 1845, one at the foot of Taylor’s Run in Bowden and the other in Parsons. The mill at Taylor’s Run was just a sawmill, while the one in Parsons was a saw and gristmill. Abraham Parsons built the Parsons mill, but it was destroyed in the flood of 1857. He then rebuilt it in 1859, but did not rebuild the gristmill. After that, ownership of the sawmill changed hands several times before the building was torn down in 1933 (D.D. Brown Collection).
In 1858, Allender mill was built. Jack Allender related the following story about it:
At the lower end of our place, I reckon my granddad had an up and down saw. We got the blade off of it—the teeth were that long (makes sign of two inches)—it was water operated. They claimed they could roll a log up on it, and they had a big wheel like a gristmill, and it run that sawmill. They said you could put a log on that and go and eat your dinner, come back, and the board was done.
These mills were all powered by water, which turned a wheel around, which in turn moved the saw up and down. They were sometimes jokingly called “up today, down tomorrow” saws. This method was indeed slow and produced approximately 500 board feet per day, although it was less backbreaking than doing it by hand. The next leap in technology arrived with the Civil War. Fort Milroy, located on the frigid top of Cheat Mountain near Cheat Bridge, had a small steam-powered circular sawmill, which was another vast improvement. However, it was not put to much use, as the soldiers worked more on survival than logging.
River drives were to be the next
interesting, albeit short, piece of Shavers Fork history. According to J.L.
Goddin, a man by the name of Goolick took out some of the best logs in the
1880s, mostly poplar
trees, and floated them downstream. Shortly after, W.S.
Dewing & Sons of Kalamazoo, Michigan, began buying up
much of the area around Cheat Bridge through a contractor named Col. A.H. Winchester and his wife, Ella (at
that time Cheat
Bridge was known as Winchester).
Cheat Bridge: A rare picture of the once thriving community at Cheat Bridge. Notice the covered bridge that was used at the time. This photo was taken during the era when the road was still known as the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike. It was also the headquarters for W.S. Dewing & Sons on Cheat Mountain. Photo courtesy Cheat Mountain Club
This was the first large-scale commercial logging to take place on the watershed. Logs were marked with a W for Winchester and floated all the way down to Point Marion, Pennsylvania. There was even a house boat on the Shavers Fork built near Taylor’s Run that housed fourteen men for their trip down the river with the logs. This outfit lasted for three or four years in the early 1890s, and the effects of it can still be seen. Rocks were blasted in the upper Shavers Fork to clear the river, and splash dams were created to control the spring flows (D.D. Brown Collection).
1899 Dewing & Sons sold the land to J.G. Luke of Brooklyn, New York, for $585,000, which was approximately $8.65 an acre, fairly costly at that time (Deike, p. 5). This price also included a sawmill and planing mill at Point Marion, Pennsylvania, as well as all the logging equipment already there.
William Luke and his six sons, directors of the newly formed West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company, then proceeded to develop the area, putting in logging camps as early as 1900. Life in the camps was rough. Men got up before dawn and worked until dark. But their pay was fair, and the food is reported to have been great. Camps were identified by number, and as the camps moved, the numbers moved with them.
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WVP&P heads: Rare picture of the men behind the
West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. Front row L to R David L. Luke, Emory P.
Shaffer (supt. Of the Cass operations), Samuel L. Slaymaker (sales Manager),
Thomas Luke, Harvey Cromer (land acquisition and surveyor). Back row L to R.
Richard Beaston (procurement manager), M. Otley (owner of McCall magazine),
William Luke, D. Talbott (company attorney), Allen L. Luke (in front of talbott),
and John G. Luke. June, 1909 at the cheat mountain clubhouse> four of these
men were company presidents: William Luke, 1888-1905; John G. Luke, 1905-1921;
David L. Luke 1921-1934; Thomas Luke 1934-45.
Photo and Caption courtesy Roy
Clarkson.
Payday was once a month, and Terry Grimes told
me that his grandfather used to put 
a twist in his suspenders for each day he
worked, so he knew he was getting paid fairly. Some of the evidence from those
little hamlets comes from the news reports that some of the camps sent into the
Pocahontas Times to report on life in the camps. Full of wit and
at times difficult to understand, these letters from the camps offer insight in
the positive attitude held by the wood hicks. Keep in mind that the first
article was written July 4, 1901:
A logging camp on the move on Cheat Mountain. This was one of the Bemis
logging crews.
In back a log loader can be seen. Photo courtesy
Keith Metheny from his
grandfather, Clair Metheny
Our camp is on the headwaters of Cheat River. The railroad (log road) comes within two and a half miles of our camp and will come on to the camp next fall some time. The grading is completed this far now.
We had iced tea and ice cream last Sunday made from ice gathered out of the mountains up here within a mile of our camp.
H. R. Warner is our foreman, and is getting good work done.
Fred Beard is scaling the lumber as it is cut.
“Old Smoke” is here, went fishing the other day, but didn’t catch any fish. Says there are no fish in this part of the country.
“Paul Bunyan” is filing six saws and going to see six girls. Keeps him busy too.
Mr. Shaffer, the superintendent, comes to see us frequently.
Mr. Cass paid us a visit last week.
Henry Dawson and a party of fishermen from Hinton passed here on their way down to Cheat Bridge some time ago.
Several of the boys are going out for the Fourth, but about as many come in as go out.
James Kirkpatrick is our cook, and Auburn Pyles, the “schoolmarm,” is cookee.
With best wishes for a hot time the Fourth, we are, Uncle Waldo
No. 2 Camp is located near the thriving hamlet of Spruce, which consists of a store, post office, and a number of magnificent dwellings. D.J. Tabor, foreman, has a full crew of about seventy-five men. Jud is herding Arbuckle signatures to exchange to the Arbuckle Brothers for road monkeys and swampers.
Mr. Ed Hunter is the woods superintendent. He has been in the employ of the West Virginia Spruce Lumber Company for over two years. He is a faithful enterprising woodsman, liked by all. —Rosebud Jim
Lost, strayed, or kidnapped: a small road monkey about the size of a man, weight 180 pounds, sandy complexion with red whiskers, disappeared from the road monkey navy on January 31, 1903. When last seen (he) was headed toward Huntersville. Any information leading to his whereabouts or apprehension will be cheerfully accepted by the Road Monkeys Lodge.
The teamster and the road monkeys had it round and round, the teamster put the road monkey down on the ground. —Snowball Bill (Pocahontas Times, February 12, 1902)
The snow is from three to five-feet deep. On the north sides it is deeper than on the sunny southern sides. This is a wilderness of a place now as the snow is so deep. One day it snows and possibly the next is sunshine. It often threatens rain but cannot rain seemingly. We haven’t had any real cold weather here this winter; the coldest it had been was about twenty degrees below. The little spruce trees just bending down crowded with snow, making it very disagreeable for men to go through.
John Hardy is our enterprising foreman. He has under his employment seventy men. Edward Smith is our cook; Shorty Allman is one of his cookees; David Smith is buck swamper with his gang; Wild Bill Smith is blacksmithing; Johnny Eagan is barn boss and Lobby Hog and a fine one too. His work is keeping the barn in good shape for the teamsters, and if a horse gets knocked out, he looks after him. The Lobby work is keeping fire, cleaning up after the crew turns out, filling the water barrel for the men to wash. He gets wood for the cook stove. We burn coal in the Lobby Stove.
We have a beautiful habitation here. Our surroundings are shining snow. The trains just look as if they are going through a cut all the way, as the employees have shoveled the snow out on either side so often.
We are glad to have a post office so near our habitation. We have a
beautiful little town on the river now. The post office is still called Spruce.
There are several dwelling houses, a big store. A large mill has been built for
peeling pulp, cutting it in short blocks. They have fine machinery in it and are
contemplating adding more to it. Anyone who never saw such things, it is worth
their while to see it run. This would be an ideal summer resort as the air is
pure and cool.
The Spruce Company has at work four engines; three steam loaders, and loads at various places with hooks. They are doing a big business and are a big help to the people in old Pocahontas as they pay fair wages for labor.
All we need is a church at our town as it would be nice to pass off the Sabbath days in attending religious worship.
I think our county court ought to look after the liquor traffic more than they do, as the hog’s ears are still in operation. If our court has power to stop them from selling, I think they should do so or grant license to some good man and let the county have the benefit it (Pocahontas Times, March 9, 1905).
John Barkley, teamster, with team and trail of logs, Cheat Mountain, WV Pulp & Paper Company. Photo courtesy Ivan Clarkson.
West Virginia Pulp & Paper was responsible for forming the towns of Cass and Spruce, both of which they established from the ground up. Cass was a lumber mill town, and Spruce had an “unbarker” mill, which supplied pulpwood to the paper mill in Covington, Virginia.
Rev. W.W. Sutton, in his memoirs written in 1944, recalls early logging up on Cheat Mountain:
When the West Virginia Spruce Lumber Company began operations on the head of Shaver’s Fork, H.F. Cromer was employed as scout. No doubt he was the man best fitted for such a job, and granting that all accounts were true, he had many an interesting experience with both man and beast in his travels through those woods.
The Greenbrier Division of the C & O [Chesapeake and Ohio] had been completed up as far as Cass. Late in the year 1900, a standard gauge switchback road had been completed up Leatherbark, and it crested Cheat Mountain within 200 yards of Shavers Fork Camp, No. 2, built late in December. This scribe went up that mountain in the afternoon of January 2, 1901 and met the first load of spruce logs coming down that had been cut near the top.
Ed Hunter was boss at Camp 2. We went to work the next day. The railroad track was being laid across the top. Ed Hunter put me to swamping for two days, then to rolling skid with Henry Galford. They were skidding logs right on the top of this low place in the mountain. The men slept the first few nights in bunks built of boards from which the ice had not yet been melted. I took a severe cold from it. The first week of April 1901, there fell a soft snow on Cheat more than three feet deep.
Stanley Wooddell also wrote a memoir of his life, and he recalls a
fishing trip with his father where his father showed him the scars of the land
that held valuable lessons:
We fished down to what Dad called the rough and tumble landing at the mouth of what we called the Slide Run. This run got its name from the two-mile long slide from the railroad to the low place, now where the Snowshoe road forks. Logs were hewn flat and cribbed up level as much as eight to ten feet high, placed in a trough-like position, and held in place by long drift bolts. Logs were decked along this slide, and when the weather got cold enough, water was poured on the slide to make it slick.
The logs were rolled and slid down the long run
to the railroad. Sometimes a log would jump out of the trough and a crew of ten
men went along and lifted them back into the slide. This they called “sacking
the slide.” These men slid logs day and night—once for three days and nights
without a rest. The wages then were one dollar a day plus board. Two men carried
grub along the slide; one was my uncle, Grover Wooddell. They carried
five-gallon cans of coffee and a barrel of food strapped on their backs to feed
the hicks.-
Loggers pause for a picture displaying the
tools of the trade; a crosscut saw, axes for notching a tree and bumping limbs,
mauls for driving wedges to assist in felling
a tree or to prevent pinching of
the saw, and a measuring stick for laying off logs.
Photo and caption courtesy
Roy Clarkson
The big log camp was built about half way up the Slide Run, and a wagon road used to haul supplies and hay for the horses to the camp. This road can still be seen in some places. The empty cans there looked like a big sawdust pile at a country sawmill.
The men there were a rough and hearty bunch and
always ate with their hats on. A southern cook asked them to leave their hats in
the lobby when they came to the table. Everyone did except one big Canadian. He
said no tar heel would boss him. The cook took him by the ears and took him to
the lobby where the
Canadian picked up a poker and made for the cook, who took a
butcher knife from under his apron and told the big Canadian to come on in but
he would leave his head in his hat in the lobby. The camp boss, Lanty Cole,
separated them, but there was no more eating at the table with hats on.
Henry Nefflen recalls hearing about the importance of cooks from his friend “Sparky,” “Sparky said how he was 17-18 years old and he was playing ball and his uncle got him and sent him off to a logging camp, and he had to walk into them. And he would say that everyplace paid about the same, and when you went into the camp you stayed there, for months maybe. But you were there while you were working. So what made men go to one camp or another was the cooks, and who was the good cook.”
A cook and his “cookees” on Cheat Mountain near Spruce, 1910. These were employees of West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. Photo Courtesy Roy Clarkson
These early logging camps played a significant role in the history of
America, and their place has been lost to time. As Americans became more
mobile, the need to establish logging camps
disappeared. Devane Cussins shares
memories from when he was a child visiting the log camps a little later, around
the 1940s:
I loved to hang around the log camps and talk to the wood hicks. Mr. Sager was the head cook at the camp at Spruce. You could always get a big steak and biscuit sandwich, or some sugar cookies, and a big bowl of chocolate pudding. Old log camps seemed to be built the same, and I guess I had visited them all.
The lobby was next to the kitchen with a big potbelly stove in the center of the floor and benches all around the walls. They would bank the stove at night. Find I can remember that I used to get up real early in the mornings, I guess around three or four o’clock, take my railroad lantern and go to the log camp. I would stoke the fire so it would be hot when the wood hicks got up. Mr. Sager would give me a big bowl of oatmeal and some sugar cookies when breakfast was ready.
A rare picture of
mealtime in a log camp. This picture is dated September 1950, well after the
traditional log camps had disappeared. Courtesy Monongahela National Forest.
Then I would help the drivers get the horses ready to go to the woods. We had to feed them, put the harness on, and hook up the single or double trees. After everyone was off to work, then it was time for me to go back home and get ready for school. Or, if there was no school, sometimes I would go to the woods with the drivers and watch the men cut trees and skid the logs down to the log landing. There I could help knock the grabs out of the logs, stamp each of the logs on both ends, then use a cant hook and roll the logs over the bank into the pond. At first they had all horses. Then later on, I remember there was a caterpillar or two. Sometimes I could ride on the cat to skid the logs. (Grabs: i.e. skidding tongs, a pair of hooks attached by links to a ring and used for skidding logs.)
Then there was the loaders, to load the logs on the flat cars. I could ride in the loader and shovel coal to keep the boiler hot or just stand and watch. I loved to watch the loader operator swing the tongs to the hookup man. He would catch the tongs, open them up, and throw them at a log. It seems the tongs always stuck to the log he aimed at, and then he would jump out of the way.
Next was the skidders. I could get up in the skidder and watch all the maze of cables and pulleys as the trolley went down the cable and came back up the mountain with a load of logs. Sometimes I would go down the mountain to where the men were cutting the trees and watch them hook up the logs. The bellboy had what looked to me like a giant clothespin with two wires attached. Every time one of the loggers yelled a command to the bellboy, he would squeeze the clothespin together. It would ring a bell inside the skidder, and the skidder operator would sound the whistle on the skidder. I was always careful to stay out of the way when the load of logs started up the mountain, because they knocked down anything in their path. It was really dangerous in the woods when they were operating.
Back at the log camp, I could visit
the saw shop and watch the filer sharpen the crosscut saws or watch the
blacksmith make horseshoes. Usually he would let me turn the crank on the forge
where the
metal was heated. Or I could turn the crank to the grindstone while
one of the loggers sharpened his axe.
In the evening when they brought the horses back in from the woods, I could watch while they took the harness off, then help feed and brush them down. All the horses had names like Nip, Tuck, Dan, Mabel, Tom, and Jerry.
The Shay engines from Cass usually came to camp once or sometimes twice a day to bring empty flat cars for logs. And I think once a week there would be a boxcar with supplies for the camp and whatever the wood hicks ordered, like cigarette tobacco for the roll your own and chewing tobacco. All the loggers wore hobnail shoes. I think they called them corks.
I remember one man named Thad Higgins lived across the shay tracks from the log camp with his wife in a small shanty. He would invite me to eat with them sometimes, and I always thought she made the best beans and cornbread in the world. Sometimes if I ate there and then went home and my mother had supper ready, if I said I was not hungry, my mother always asked, “You been up there eating at that Thad Higgins place again?” - A steam skidder on Cheat Mountain near Spruce. The intricate rigging is clearly seen as is the daredevil standing on top of the tower. Photo and caption courtesy Roy Clarkson
Technology constantly increased production;
changing the way the industry worked and the loggers lived. In the early 1920s,
steam skidders were first introduced that eventually replaced traditional horse
logging. The last horse camp (Camp #95) pulled up camp on
Cheat Mountain in 1946. These
steam skidders left huge trenches in the earth; many can still be seen today.
They are being replaced now by diesel skidders and sometimes helicopters.
Harvey Hamrick explains how the overhead skidders worked:
Let me give you a little history of how the skidder worked. You see, you got these lines running back. You got an overhead cable, which was an inch and a quarter cable. It was a great big cable. That’s what they hauled the logs on. It goes way up in the air off the power of the skidder and back into the tree on the top of the mountain—what they called the tail tree. All right, then that cable would run through a block in this tree and back down to the ground and snub it onto about three big trees or stumps, whatever you got. You put it around one way, and back around this way, and back around the other, and use what they called tie wire in it to fasten it down so it can’t get loose, you see?
A sketch of an overhead skidder with attached lines. The dragging logs are what caused the deep gouges in the ground that can still be seen today. Sketch attributed to William A. Lunk, June 24, 1913. Photo Courtesy Monongahela National Forest.
You’ve got other cables running, what they call a re-haul, and you got a slack line. And it all runs back, and a buggy—what they call a buggy—which is a contraption that runs on this cable with wheels in it, and your cable comes through this. It’s got a big hook on it, and you’ve got what they call chokers. It’s hooked on each log, you see, eight–ten–twelve logs, whatever you get a hold of. They’re all brought in together when he picks up from the skidder, which is maybe 500 or 5,000 feet away or more down at the railroad.
Once these skidder lines went across the top of this mountain and across another top and across another top and on down where they had what you call five middle trees. Had to bring the logs to this tree. All right. You had to change around and bring them to this tree; change around, bring them to this tree; change around and bring them to this tree, and then you went on in to the skidder: 11,000 feet, that’s what it was.
You see, to get your signals, you had what they called a bell wire. It runs clear from the skidder up, and some had what they called a bell ringer, a bellboy. He rang the signals, and you had certain numbers. For instance, you wanted to pick up—all right, you took your short, you just took your wires, which was bare wire, and do them like that for shorts. Or if it was a long, you went like that. Whatever your signals were, it rang the bell in the skidder, and he knew exactly what to do. Otherwise there would be no way to run it without some signal some way.
They had four guys besides the man that was handling the big cable. They had these chokers, which was a strand of cable with a hook on one end and an eye on the other. And you just took that and went right around your log and back-hooked the thing in that hook, and then hooked all these—which may be eight or ten chokers—was hooked on these logs, and you had to pull it under here, you see, to get the skid lines all hooked together. And, of course, what you did, you just hooked one through, and it just slid on the cable until you got your next and your next until you put it on these bull hooks, they called them, which was down at the end of your skidding line. When you’d get them all hooked, you’d ring into the skidder, pick up. You’d pick up the load, and they’d pull them logs clear yonder in the air, maybe 40 or 50 feet or maybe thirty or whatever height the line was. Then they’d take the logs into the skidder. So that’s the way and that’s just a rough idea of the way it operated.
Harvey Hamrick relates a personal experience working on these overhead skidders:
He put me doing blocks. A guy the name of Roger Cotrell was on the blocks before me. He’s the one that got fired. He told me about this black snake up in this tree, big old ash tree. I kind of believed him. And I kind of didn’t believe him. But I didn’t know. I was just an oiler. I oiled blocks.
Anyway, they put me to oiling blocks.
I had about fifty, and I had to oil them about . . . I’d get around at least
every three days. You had trees way up there to climb. You had climbers, you
know. And I had an old pair of climbers. The spurs were about that long, and
they would slip out, you know, you get way up in the tree. But anyway, this time
I kept going by this winch line block, and I said, “Oh, that doesn’t need any
oil.” So I kept skipping it.
One morning I thought: what if the boss finds out I haven’t oiled this block? He’ll get on me. I’d better oil it. So I started up that tree. All I could think about was that black snake he said was in it. It was a hollow tree, all right, so I got up, oh, I was up about twenty-five feet. I took my rope up the tree. You know how you operate with climbers: you’ve got this rope to keep in your hands, you see, and you just keep flipping it up as you go up. I’m climbing, going up. All at once, I have to flip it up and pull on it, and it felt like it was slipping.
I looked around, and there was this old black snake. I had the rope right over him, and he was licking his tongue right out in my face. I could have cut the snake in two if I’d just had sense enough. Instead of that I set all holds loose down the tree. I skinned the hide off my fingers, my chest, my legs, and hit the ground—ten feet at least I dropped. The old snake went out one side of the tree, and I went out the other. (Harvey laughs.) He wasn’t lying to me. And I’ll tell you one thing, that block never got oiled while I was there!
September 1950. Second growth of native red spruce about 50 years old at the head of Second Fork. Railroad and Ligenwood logging of the Mower Lumber Co. “Turn” of logs at skidder terminus of trip. Photo courtesy Monongahela National Forest.
Increases in technology had a great impact on
profits. Unfortunately, this also had an increased effect on the landscape, as
much of the new technology focused solely on how to increase board feet removed
per day and not on how to sustain the forest. Luckily for Cheat Mountain, West
Virginia Pulp & Paper had some forward thinking individuals at the time. Early
on they planted 25,000 spruce trees just off Shavers Fork in 1909 and 170,000
spruce and 2,000 yellow poplar in 1910 (PVB Collection).
Jim White describes what the landscape looked like after the first phases of logging ended. After returning from World War II, he goes on a fishing trip:
It’s right where that lake is at Snowshoe. So
right where those two little creeks came together, the railroad came across and
was on the east side. And then they had a line that didn’t follow the river
down. It gradually came up the east side of that mountain and came out about on
the top of the mountain. They may have had a skidder up on top of the mountain,
I don’t know. But this was a line that took it off the east side as well as the
west side. Right where it crosses the river there, that’s where we found that.
We went right down there, followed that old railroad grade to down where it
crossed the creek.
That was the most despondent looking place I’ve ever seen in my life. They had just pulled the skidders out of there the year before. You could hardly get to the river—just a place here and there. The first time they logged that, nineteen hundred and two or three, somewhere like that, they did it by horses. They select cut it. They didn’t cut all of it, or I’ll presume they didn’t because they cut it again in 1942. I assume they left some sizeable logs in there. They used horses to get it out.
I never saw a place where those skidders had worked, but I saw it up there then. They had cut everything off ten feet above the earth. They cut everything. There was nothing green left. It was worse than a battlefield. I told my brother then, I said, “I’ll never be back to this place. It’s no use coming here for fishing.”
You go up over that mountain now, and you can hardly see where that logging had been. Stuff’s growing back, and it’s green. Five, six years later, we decided to go back and go fishing. It was amazing how that river got cleaned up. All of it had washed out. Little spruce was coming up again, and it looked like a different country. Good fishing. Maybe not what it had been one time, but it was good fishing.
Sept. 1950 Native Red Spruce second growth timber about 50 years old at head of Second Fork, Cheat River, railroad and Ligerwood logging of the Mower Lumber Co., Cass, W.Va. About 45 years since original logging. “Chaker hookers” hooking chakers at the buggy (carriage). Photo courtesy Monongahela National Forest.
Stanley Wooddell ruminates on the changes of land use:
I stood at the end of the chairlift at Snowshoe’s Ballhooter ski slope recently and watched the people riding the cable chairs up the mountain. This reminded me of seeing the logs being hauled from one mountain to the other by the big overhead skidders, sometimes as much as a thousand feet in the air. But these are all gone, and the only thing there now is the Snowshoe development operation on the head of the Shavers Fork of Cheat River.
West Virginia Pulp & Paper later decided to sell their land on Cheat Mountain and move elsewhere in the state.
Jim White relates:
For some reason, perhaps because of the Depression, West
Virginia Pulp & Paper sold all their holdings from
Cheat Bridge down to Bemis to the
National Forest. That was a considerable amount. They sold it all to the
National Forest. They also sold a tremendous amount of land up on Gauley
Mountain, but they still cut timber up there. Mower bought that company out in
1942.
South of Cheat Bridge, Mower Lumber continued to extensively cut the
timber off of the mountain for another eighteen years, mostly with skidders. It
was during this time that the first chainsaws were introduced on the mountain.
They were bulky, heavy, and not much quicker than crosscut saws, and weren’t
used much on Cheat Mountain
until the mid-‘70s.
Beavertail: A Disston “Beavertail” chainsaw
being demonstrated on Cheat Mountain, in 1948. The early models of chainsaws were
heavy, bulky and not much more efficient than the crosscut saws. It was
not until the 70’s until chainsaws gained much popularity in the area. Photo courtesy Roy Clarkson.
The last hook of an overhead skidder left the mountain June 29, 1960. Mower Company then sold their holdings to a new owner, who named his company “The Mower Company.” This outfit select-cut the top of Cheat Mountain until the late ‘80s.
In April 1988, Senator Robert Byrd announced the sale of the Mower Tract—40,745 acres—to the Monongahela National Forest. This, of course, wasn’t the entire area of the southern tip of the watershed. Carl Frischkorn, a former co-owner of Cheat Mountain Club, further explains:
The Mower Lumber Company then sold the land, about 42,000 acres, to the Monongahela Forest through a nonprofit group in San Francisco called the Trust for Public Land, but kept a reserve of thirty million board feet of red spruce, which was interesting. The public was against the sale because of the loss of tax base and jobs, so that was done to keep some jobs for a bit, to help the transition.
Mower Lumber took out logs by truck until 1993 at which time the Monongahela National Forest placed a ten-year rest period on the area. (Clarkson II, p. 95)
Johnny Pulp was not the only outfit working the Shavers Fork. After the Civil War, logging company contractors approached many farmers to sell their hillsides to the lumber companies for cash. This prospect seemed good to the largely subsistent agriculturalists who until that point had bartered for most of what they needed but could not produce themselves.
There were many companies on the watershed—Parsons Pulp & Paper, Bemis Lumber, Cheat River Lumber Company, J.M. Bemis & Son, Coketon Lumber Company—to name a few. D.D. and M.M. Brown headed one such company. This was another family business. They owned a mill in Elkins and the town of Montes, located several miles downstream from Bemis and now nothing more than a ghost town. After the Browns purchased 2,000 acres of virgin timber in the area and contracted to have a bridge built “strong enough to carry the heaviest Western Maryland Railway Company engine then in service,” the town of Montes was born.
In 1905, the Browns brought a circular mill in to quickly saw lumber for the camp and millhouse, etc. After this, a complete eight-foot Giddings and Lewis Manufacturing Company band mill was built, and millwrights were brought into service. This area produced 44,800,000 board feet of lumber, which averaged 22,000 feet per acre. This was an amazing amount, considering that the spruce and mixed hardwood forests today would probably produce closer to 10–12,000 feet per acre. The mill at Montes averaged 52,000 feet per day, and 88,000 feet was the record for one ten-hour workday. This means that on average, the operation in that area cleared two-and-a-half acres of woods in a day, four acres on the best day! The company recorded that it took out approximately a quarter spruce wood, a quarter hemlock, and half mixed hardwoods.
Montes Mines in 1998
From the log Mark Tracy kept during his inventory of the West Virginia Central Railroad by rail-bike
June 12-8hr-8mi.
Although it is raining I go to Bemis with hopes of capturing GPS data from MP 43 to MP 47.
In Mile 44 I find the old Montes Spur and the remains of the bridge. The Montes Spur at one time crossed to the east bank of the Shavers Fork at this point. Of the three bridge foundations only the one on the west bank remains standing, the other two have been overturned by the river. There is a camp visible on the east bank of the Shavers Fork.
Within sight of MP 45 there is the remains of an old brick structure. This structure is made of firebrick and is double walled. I assume it is a coke oven. Several years ago I was exploring the mountain above this point. Approximately 600 vertical feet above the ruins is an old road that goes by the adits of several abandoned coal mines. There are cones of dirty red gob below the entrances. The road then led to a point on the ridge directly above the ruins and from there a scar led straight down the fall line to the ruins. I assume the coal was moved by gravity from the mines down to the railroad, probably with an incline such as was used at the Hopkins Mine.
Another Clue to the Past
June 8-9hr.-15mi.
I go to McGee Run….Across the river from this point lies the WVCRR. I must ford the river twice; first with the GPS equipment, tool kit, lunch, etc., and second with the rail-bike. The riverbed is 50m wide at this point. The water is only knee deep but the crossing is treacherous due to the slick brown slime that covers everything under the surface of the water.
At MP 57. For the second time I note an apple tree as a GPS Point. An apple tree is a non-native species along the upper Shavers Fork. They only grow where they have been planted and they have only been planted in places where people have spent a considerable amount of time. An apple tree shows where there used to be housing for a logging camp, a mine, or a railroad section crew. When I find an apple tree if I look around I will usually find the remains of these work camps, i.e., some square stones that were foundations for their buildings, the remains of an old railroad siding, a spring, metal junk, and a pile of ketchup bottles and mustard jars. These sites also usually have a contemporary backpacker’s camp. These apple trees are an example of plants indicating an archeological site.
After I finish my GPS survey for today I must again ford the river two times. The rail-bike is very difficult to push across the submerged and slick river bottom cobbles and I vow to ford this river as few times as possible.
Right upstream was the town of Bemis, home to a very large operation, and big enough to require its own doctor. In Big Doc and Little Doc, published in 1968, Harry R. Werner, M.D. wrote an account of his days as a young doctor in Bemis during the first few years of the 20th century. Here he describes the log camps near Bemis (then called Fishing Hawk):
Fishing Hawk lay in a narrow valley beside Cheat River. Hills of evergreen rose to a tremendous height on either side. The logging camps were distributed at six or eight-mile intervals through the forest. The hills were so steep that the railroad climbed in a series of switchbacks. That is, the tracks continued for several miles at a grade that was considered safe, ending in a spur. The log train ran onto the spur, the switch was thrown, and the train traveled backward on the next frock, proceeding through several switches, backward and forward, until it reached the top of the hill.
Two of the camps were situated on one hill, a part of Cheat Mountain. Each camp was made up of several buildings and fed and housed twenty to sixty men. In bark-peeling season, the camps were full. One building contained the kitchen and dining hall, also sleeping quarters for the cook and the cookee. In this building the cook was boss. No visitors were allowed in the kitchen. The cook had a big job and wanted no interruptions, and there was no room for idlers.
A huge range took up one side of the kitchen, with room only for the wood box. The opposite side was flanked by a long pastry table, a sink, and serving table. The walls were decorated with cooking utensils of all sizes. There were dippers, skimmers, colanders, long griddles, skillets, and large pans for baking six or eight loaves of bread. Huge coffeepots that held at least two gallons stood on the shelves. Barrels of flour, fifty-pound tins of lard, and enormous cans of granulated and brown sugar stood in rows under the tables.
The cookee prepared vegetables, washed dishes, and set the long tables covered with brown-checkered oilcloth. I saw one cookee stand at the end of a table, take one plate at a time, and with a flip of the wrist spin and place each one where he wanted it to go. The plates were laid upside down, and a tin cup for coffee was placed on top. A knife, fork, and spoon were set by the plate.
The men used the backs of their hands to wipe their mouths, so there was no need for napkins. All the food was put on the table before the men were called in. Big platters of meat that was cut in servings; huge dishes piled high with steaming boiled or fried potatoes, canned corn, cabbage, stewed tomatoes; plates of cookies, doughnuts, thick slices of bread, and pies cut into quarters, with tall granite pots of strong coffee and milk served from the cans, loaded the tables.
The men filed in when called, took their places, and ate. Scarcely a word was spoken during the meal. In fact, the cook’s orders were, “Eat and get out!” The rule saved both time and controversy.
When the meal was over, the cookee gathered up the dishes. He had dishwashing down to a science. The steel knives, forks, and spoons were put into a cloth bag and submerged into boiling suds, then dipped into clean boiling water and spread out to dry. The tin coffee cups were treated in the same manner. The other dishes were then washed, lifted out onto a rack, scalded, and left to dry.
The bunkhouse was a long building where the men slept. It also contained a lobby or lounging room where they spent their leisure hours in spinning yarns or playing checkers. The man who looked after the bunkhouse was called a lobby-hog. It was his duty to straighten beds, clean floors, look after the fires, bring in wood, empty ashes, and clean the brown crockery of the spittoons. He also kept the wood boxes filled in the kitchen and dining room.
The day began at 6 in the morning when the lobby-hog yelled, “All out!” There was a scramble as the men rolled out of their bunks, grabbed trousers and shirts and pulled them on over long, heavy underwear which they wore day and night. The men washed in tin basins arranged in a long wooden trough where the lobby-hog had placed pails of fresh water. Each pail contained a big dipper. One dipper filled a washbasin. Some of the men used a comb on their hair; others slicked it down merely with their hands.
Breakfast appeared at 6:30 A.M. The tables were set with tall stacks of pancakes or buckwheat cakes, stewed prunes known as logger-berries at camp, fried ham, sausage, beefsteak, potatoes, doughnuts, coffee, canned milk, sugar, butter, and syrup. The men were through breakfast and on the job by 7 o’clock. Dinner was served at 12 noon and supper at 6 P.M. In extremely cold weather, the cookee carried hot coffee and doughnuts to the men at 10 in the morning and at 4 in the afternoon.
No man who worked at the Bemis camps could complain of the quantity or quality of the food. Mr. Bemis never had trouble getting workers. Grievances were talked over with the foreman and usually ended with an adjustment that was agreeable to all concerned.
Elkins Pail & Lumber Company, a company active on the lower part of the watershed, bought up much of the land from Bickles Knob near Elkins to Little Black Fork, a long tributary about eight miles downstream. But in 1911, they entered a contract with D.D. Brown under which they sold the land and received timber at a discounted price indefinitely. Brown then logged it until about 1917 when, because of labor losses due to young men being “called to their colors” for World War I, they sold their land to Porterwood Lumber Company, which was working much of the lower Shavers (D.D. Brown Collection).
Grace Gainer recalls her father logging both for himself and for Porterwood:
Dad cut. He worked there up in the woods, cutting timber. He cut timber off of our farm, and he took it down to the river. They [Porterwood Lumber Company] brought their loader up, and it reached across the river, took those logs over and put them on the train and sawed ‘em, and brought them back and put them over there for dad to build the barn with.
By 1920, D.D. Brown was at it again on the other side of the river, establishing a large Frick circular mill with 20,000 feet per day capacity. In 1921 and 1922 the operation had to shut down for a period because of the depression, but started back again and continued on until 1925 when the Brown outfit moved down to Crystal Springs in Greenbrier County.
Agnes Smith-Wilmoth recalls in a memoir that she wrote about the end of the logging camps there:
The timber was cut out in 1927, and the railroad was made into a car road, but years of trains, timber cutting, and the vast amount of logs we’ve seen will always remain in memory. Trees were cut with crosscut saws. Power saws not heard of at that time. Saw filers kept the saw sharp. My dad worked on the railroad. He cut timber and was a teamster for years. Woods work and farming were his lifework.
There were lumber camps along the way. Some kept as many as sixty men, and they fed them good. One cook died in 1922 at the dinner table of a heart attack. That was the camp between the Squire Long and Columbus Coberly farms called Camp H.
The end of the timber era left the small community of Pettit, a few miles south of Porterwood, a lonely place and many out of work. Many residents left for other places, some far away.
All this logging at the same time caused severe ecological damage to the mountains and erosion along the streams. In 1908, some 10 percent of West Virginia burned. Many fires occurred because treetops and branches were left on the mountainsides. These branches dried, creating ideal tinder for fires which were often ignited by ashes from the steam engines. These fires then spread to uncut stands, destroying valuable forest land.
Jim White recalls his father battling the fires during the Depression, at Twin Bridges near Spruce:
So down at the Twin Bridges, I was talking
about this run that come down off Bald Knob. I think the cause of Twin Bridges
is because the run doesn’t come straight down, it bends over to the right side,
which is the Bald Knob side. And as it bends, there are two bridges there to
cross the thing, and out of that, Big Run empties into the river. The Shavers
Fork seems designed to go over and pick up that run and then come back. They
were cutting timber down in that area back then, and it was down there. I
remember my dad going down there and sleeping on the ground, and they were
fighting the fire. For two weeks they were fighting that fire. It was a very sad
time. Now that’s t
he only fire that I know about, but there were fires all over
the country. Maybe the state of
West Virginia was burning up because
it was so dry and there was no rain.
In 1907, a huge flood caused more than $100,000,000 damage along the Monongahela River—$8 million in the city of Pittsburgh alone—and this is 1907 dollars (Berman 28–30). It did not take long to realize that unregulated logging was not good for anyone. The fires and the flood, combined with other environmental disasters taking place around the nation, helped push Congress into action. In 1911 Congress passed the Weeks Law, and began to purchase land. They created national forests out of these purchases of private land in the east. Previously national forests had only been created on public land west of the Mississippi.
The Monongalia National Forest was thus created in 1920 explicitly to protect the headwaters of the Monongahela River, into which the Cheat River flows. With these lofty ideals, the Monongahela National Forest spent much of its first years simply buying land, planting trees, and battling forest fires. Very few timber sales happened until the 1940s.
Cross country skiing in the Monongahela National Forest in the 1930’s. Photo courtesy Monongahela National Forest.
The National Forest experienced a huge growth during the Depression as logging companies tried to get rid of their logged-over land. West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company sold its land from Cheat Bridge to Bemis to the Monongahela National Forest during the Depression, having cut it out and seeing no future value in it.
Because of the severity of the Depression,
President Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a brilliant
idea that took young unemployed men off the streets and gave them lodging and a
small stipend in exchange for public work. It was estimated that 25 percent of
young men were unemployed at that time. The CCC set up camps
throughout the
nation, doing a variety of local development tasks. In West Virginia, many
worked in the National Forests where they planted millions of trees, fought
forest fires, worked to prevent other fires by constructing fire towers. They
built roads and provided watershed improvements. here were two CCC camps that actually stayed on the watershed, although several more were
located nearby and did work on the watershed. The first was
Camp Randolph (F-9), which was
established in summer 1933 and abandoned at the end of
that year, probably due
to the cold weather. This camp developed Stuarts Park, as well as Bickles Knob
tower. This camp was also one of the few integrated CCC camps, having 189 white
and fourteen black enrollees.
The other camp also had a short history. Known as Camp Cheat
Mountain (F-23), it opened the summers of 1940 and 1941. Located right off of
Highway 250, it was likely established as a tree planting camp. It was also a
tent camp and never intended for winter use.There were several other camps, like
Camp
Parsons (F-3) and Camp Durbin that also did
quite a bit of work on the watershed but were not stationed there.
Fall in for work detail at Camp Shavers Fork, a CCC camp located near modern day Stuarts Park.
This was one of the first
integrated CCC camps in the state.
September 20, 1933.
Photo Courtesy Monongahela National Forest
Hazel Phillips remembers a bit about the CCC:
After the train went out—I don’t know if you ever heard of them or not; they called them the CCC—they came up there and took out the railroad tracks and ties. They had a camp here in Parsons, over in the nursery bottom where they spent the night, and they would bring their meals up in a truck on the other side of the river or in a handcart probably.
They had a handcart to travel up and down the railroad track, two men, pumping. And then when they got through eating their lunch, any of the neighbors along the track, they took their extra bread and distributed it to the neighbors. And that was a big treat—store-bought bread. That was during the ‘30s, during the Depression.
But World War II put an end to that service, as the young men were once again needed to defend their country. It was around this time, due to the Forest Service’s good management, that the Monongahela National Forest began to enter logging contracts once again. The first long-term Forest Service contract was with Mower Lumber Company from 1951 to 1961. This cutting was done on Cheat Mountain where West Virginia Pulp & Paper had sold its land to the Forest Service many years before.
The purpose of the national forests was enlarged to include timber wildlife management, and recreation.
Harry Mahoney, a retired Forest Ranger, explains the Monongahela National Forest’s economic benefits to the area in a 1989 interview: Aside from the share of timber receipts that go to schools . . . economic contributions through providing a supply of timber has traditionally been our major economic contribution to the local area: to have a dependable supply of timber available on a continuing basis to support a timber industry in the area. We have been doing that and probably will continue to do that, at least at a certain level.
The Forest undoubtedly contributes to tourism potential in the area, contributes that way, both in terms of providing recreation areas where people can come to, but also in terms of hunting, fishing opportunities. In a sense, we are also competing with potential private recreation areas. That has frequently been a complaint. The government comes in. There used to be free camping, and it wasn’t economical. Local people developed a commercial campground. We [now] have a charge for most of our developed camping opportunities.
We also support local agricultural industries. They are leasing grazing land. That is something: because the National Forest is here, there is less of a need for some of the public services that the state or local government would have to provide, in terms of roads and fire control and all of that sort of thing that we do.
Traditionally—there have been changes in this in the last ten years—people worked into the ranger’s position. Usually foresters became rangers and I guess that is still probably usually true. Most professional employees are foresters, although it is not a prerequisite for the job. Foresters generally in his earlier steps worked in a variety of jobs having to do with timber sales, timber stand improvement, reforestation work, national forest range resource, water projects, recreation resource, whatever happens to be in the area. Most people get considerable exposure to fire control, fisheries and wildlife work.
Generally mixed in with that are some managerial training sessions, personnel management, working with people, public relations. The last ten years or so there has been more of a trend to selecting rangers who aren’t necessarily traditional foresters, maybe archaeologists, or landscape architects, or soil scientists, engineers. They would be coming from any one of the disciplines that work in a forest.
I was ranger at Parsons during a considerable portion of the “Monongahela Controversy,” which I presume you are semi-familiar with. The Forest Service had changed its approach to timber management in the early 1960s. It had gone from what is called “uneven-aged” management toward even aged management. Even aged management involves—as a part of even aged management—regeneration of stands by clear cutting. This means we would cut all the merchantable trees plus those that aren’t merchantable, starting with a new stand of seedling. That is one part of even aged management but that is the most obvious part and most visible part to the public.
The Forest Service has raised the
public on the idea of selection management, cutting individual trees when they
became mature and leaving a general stand of trees up in the woods.
People
didn’t understand why we changed. We hadn’t done a very good of job of
explaining to people why we were changing. That was a prime example of where
people decided we must be doing bad things because we weren’t doing what they
had been taught was good. They did object.
Of course, we undoubtedly made mistakes in responding to that. This eventually led to a court case where we were enjoined from making timber sales in which we did other than cut “dead, large, or mature” trees. This is the wording of an act back in 1897 that authorized the sale of timber, although practicing selection cutting also involves cutting trees that aren’t large or mature. So we stopped, for a period in the mid 1970s, making timber sales.
Eventually this case was appealed. The appeals court agreed with the local district court here in Elkins and said that if the law of 1897 was an anachronism, the law should be changed. We would still have to live by it. That eventually led to the National Forest Management Act which went far beyond a concern about what kind of trees we cut, directed all the National Forests in the country to develop Land and Resource Management Plans and to manage resources in accordance with those plans. This was a very far-reaching act for which we can take credit or blame or whatever. People learned to spell Monongahela, I will tell you that much.