Boreas Timber

The Boreas Ponds Tract has a long storied history of logging operations over the past century

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The early years of logging at Boreas drew much local attention and renown. Newspapers faithfully reported the launch of winter timber operations, usually in the second or third week of January.

The cycle of work fit the seasons, with cutting and barking done in summer, hauling and stacking done in winter and the river runs done with snowmelt in the spring.

On Oct. 17, 1895 the Essex County Republican newspaper announced J.W. Finch stopped at the Lee House in Port Henry.

“He said FP (Finch, Pruyn) would cut 150,000 market logs this winter making 30,000,000 feet of lumber besides a large quantity of pulp wood. In Boreas, they would cut 50,000 markets and employ over 200 men. There are seven lumber jobs in Boreas country under the supervision of Messrs. Ed. Anderson, M. Sherman, Dillion, Casey and Donnelley,” the newspaper reported.

Just three months later, by January 23, 1896, Finch, Pruyn & Co. had begun sending teams and men in “to the lumber woods for winter’s work. Ten pairs of horses and a dozen men have taken their departure for the Boreas River, Essex County. Another batch of teams and men will leave soon. The teams carry a portion of the winter’s supplies for the men in camp, beside a quantity of dressed lumber to be used in building sprinklers to make the wood roads slippery and in erecting partitions within the shanties.”

Lumber crews cut further and deeper toward the northern Totten and Crossfield Township boundaries and took inventory.

“When Howard Church, our first forester, cruised it in 1911, he found volumes of timber uncut. We didn’t go back in there until 1936, almost into the 1940s. We rebuilt the Boreas dam in 1936 out of log cribs,” former Finch, Pruyn forester Dick Nason said in an interview this fall.

In keeping with its Boreas namesake, deep snow and solid ice were critical to the logging industry. 

Once a freeze took hold, the logs cut were stacked on the ponds where it sat waiting for the spring thaw.

“Basically, they utilized the winter,” Nason explained. 

“Logs were cut starting in May, and all the wood had to be peeled by Christmas time. Most French Canadians would come in after Christmas and New Year’s. Then they would start the hauling process, getting the wood onto the Boreas River in time for spring thaw.” 

They would fill either the frozen Boreas pond surfaces or LaBier (Flow), depending on where their camps were located. Each foreman was responsible to get the wood out on the ice,” Nason said.

Finch, Pruyn used both a conveyer and a stacker to get logs on the Boreas ice.

“Right where our company’s corporate lodge was, at First Pond, there was a conveyer that put the logs on the ice over winter, which was typical. We had a small stacker at LaBier Flow to put the logs on the ice there,” Nason recalled.

Up until the 1940s, logs were loaded and unloaded by hand and pulled on sleds over the snow by horses, the retired forester said.

In time, standard timber cuts for sawmills switched to smaller cuts of pulp used to make paper.

Logging methods remained much the same until about 1950.

“The Boreas was snowy because the nature of the mountains. They needed the snow to get the wood down, and they needed the snow for runoff,” Nason said.

“On the Hudson River, the peak year for drives was 1872. 

Probably about a million individual logs came down the river that year, mostly spruce and white pine, some balsam. Pulp wood didn’t come down until 1905,” Nason said.

“For pulp wood, used for paper, there were only us and International Paper with logs in the drives. After 1929, Finch, Pruyn was the only one left driving. And our last drive from Boreas was in 1950.”

Great and ragged fleets of jumbled timber floated down the Hudson by various logging companies were sorted at the big boom in Glens Falls according to log marks, which worked like brands pounded into the raw wood.

“They hit the ends of the log with a hammer that left a mark, they hit it six or seven times on each end. There were 377 individual log marks on the Hudson. I found another 30 or so that were used but never recorded,” Nason said.

“Finch, Pruyn had five different log marks, probably used to tell which timber lot it came from. The company would also buy wood along the way, wood we didn’t cut. And some of the marks could have been theirs.”

JACK DONAHUE

The dams that stopped up rivers to make ponds were integral to logging. And calculated impoundments on the Boreas, its ponds, and other Hudson tributaries allowed for storage of water to release, flushing key parts of the drive in succession.

“There were a lot of dams. There were 46 different dams on the Hudson, Boreas, Cedar and Indian and Schroon Rivers. The foremen knew from experience exactly how long it would take to move logs from one dam to another,” Nason said.

“Jack Donahue, Finch, Pruyn’s foreman from 1900 to 1940 would just know how long it took the Boreas River to reach the Hudson or if you needed more water.”

It was not a noisy process, Nason said of the timber rolling and gnashing water in those forests during a river drive.

“Once they started the drive, you had the water rushing through the dam. But there was no motorized equipment. We used some tractors in 1939 to bring sleds to the top of the mountains. We used horses to bring the wood down to the river. That was typical all over. We were cutting up on the High Peaks, almost to Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, until we had a fight with the state over stumpage.”

THE LAST CAMP

“Our last logging camp anywhere was in 1959 in Indian Lake. At Boreas, it was about 1948 when we had the last logging camp in there,” Nason recalled.

The dates make Boreas one of the final few Adirondack forest regions logged with traditional river drives by the last company to utilize the Boreas or Indian and Hudson river systems.

Afterward, logging, skidding and loading became a daytime job, men went in and came out with heavy machinery. Skidders and bulldozers, chain saws and great bark strippers replaced hand saws, axes and horses.

And the new methods needed solid roads.

Boreas today, as New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation and the Adirondack Park Agency work to assign new access for recreation, is riddled with what Town of Hudson Supervisor Ron Moore says is close to 50 miles of road.

Some 20 piles of gravel mined by Finch, Pruyn is mounded along the roads, set aside for repairs. And the towns of North Hudson and Newcomb retain easements to get gravel from Boreas.

“There are no logging camp artifacts left, besides the dams and roads,” Nason said.

And the old cabin at the Four Corners, a centerpiece where logging roads head west and east along Boreas Ponds (or Tahawus Road) and Gulf Brook Road respectively.

These wider, graveled logging roads are newer.

“The road in from Newcomb was built in 1935, called the Tahawus Road. But Gulf Brook Road was built in 1965 or 1966,” Nason said.

Some roads earned names, others were forgotten.

What remains may be the last testament to an industry that delivered fortunes to the likes of Jeremiah and Daniel Finch and Samuel Pruyn and many families who purchased far-off acres for hidden estates amid towering Adirondack spruce and white pine.

The roads alone chronicle five or more generations of hard work wrought of Boreas.

“The last of the pulp wood was brought out of there about 10 years ago, about 2007, just before Finch, Pruyn sold the property to The Nature Conservancy (Adirondack Chapter),” Nason said.

CHANGING FOREST USE

“Really, everything is so changed. The two dams have been rebuilt, so they’re not indicative of what was there during the river drive period.”

A new dam at Boreas First Pond was erected in 1996 when the new Finch, Pruyn corporate lodge was built, he said.

“Man was there, and for a long time,” Nason said of the Boreas forest lands, where ownership and surveys scrolled through more than 200 years.

Having overseen vast logging operations for 35 years, he says the Adirondack forests are growing three times more fiber than is being used.

“We’ve got such a resource and a state that keeps buying up land that it can’t cut.”

The life-cycle of the Adirondack woods is close to 120 years, Nason said.

“It’s because we don’t have a long growing season. Trimming at 10 years could cut the life-cycle to 50 or 60 years. But I foresee, down the future, a lot of the Eastern U.S. is going to be known as the ‘wood basket.’ We have the potential to do a better job managing the forests. It will take 30 to 40 years, but it will come.”

FINN VALLEY

In its heyday, lumber camps at Boreas had 30 to 45 men in a camp, housed in temporary cabins or shanties.

All remnants of these have since disappeared in what is now being called the Boreas Tract state land, according to former Finch, Pruyn & Company forester Richard “Dick” Nason, of Glens Falls.

“We had upwards of 10 to 12 camps in one year. In Boreas, we had three different camps cutting in different areas. They had techniques to get that wood off the high country,” Nason said.

“One of our camp foremen was a Finn (from Finland) and he put in a sauna on the side of Boreas (Mountain). We used to call it the ‘Finn Valley.’ He liked to cut the high country, too,” Nason chuckled.

It was a cold business.

“The men had to sleep with their boots on so they wouldn’t freeze. If they took them off, they (boots) would be frozen so stiff they couldn’t get them on in the morning.”

A CROSS CARVED IN WHITE PINE

Floating with the logs, Finch, Pruyn bateaus were painted a light blue, according to several historic photographs.

“We built our own boats in Newcomb, as needed,” Nason said.

He has film footage from the 1940s that recorded three different boats coming alongside the logs, three men in each bateau.

“Between 1900 and 1940 only three men were killed in bateaus on the Hudson River.”

Near the bridge across the Hudson in Newcomb, a cross carved into a white pine marked one loss.

“It was a Friday afternoon in 1943,” Nason remembered. “They couldn’t get an undertaker right away, so they pulled the body out and put it in the root cellar at the company headquarters until Monday. The pine is just past the overlook in Newcomb where the Finch, Pruyn headquarters was.”

The root cellar was removed this past summer, according to Newcomb historian Joan Burke.

Very few formal records exist of deaths in river drives between the 1830s and 1900, Nason said.

BLASTING

Sometimes the logs floating down a river jammed and tangled into a giant pile.

“One spring, I remember Gerard Arsenault was trying to break the pile on Boreas, first pond. He had 17 sticks of dynamite on a stick and he lit the fuse, it was a fast fuse and as he was trying to find a place to set it and it blew, and blew him across the pond. He used to cook on the River Drives. He came out and said ‘I think we’re gonna use a different method’ for setting dynamite.”