Anecdotes from the days of county timber drives
The following is a re-print of a past column by former Advertiser columnist Stephen Thorning, who passed away on Feb. 23, 2015.
Some text has been updated to reflect changes since the original publication and any images used may not be the same as those that accompanied the original publication.
Last week’s column provided a brief outline of log drives on the upper Grand River and its tributaries.
In the overall picture of Wellington County’s economy those drives were never of major economic significance, but nevertheless they constitute a fascinating aspect of our local history.
Today, more than a century after those drives ceased, it is difficult to learn much about them. A few who participated wrote or dictated some of their memories of them, usually years after those men had worked on the spring drives. There is no way of knowing how complete or representative those accounts are. Equally lacking, with a few scattered exceptions, are business records of the sawmills and logging firms themselves.
Gilbert McWhirter’s recollections of the logging days, written in 1925, is the best single account of the logging days on the upper Grand. McWhirter first worked on a log drive in 1869. He noted that logs during his time were floated no farther than Elora. In earlier days, though, it appears that logs were sent as far as Bridgeport or even Galt. A photograph, probably taken by Thomas Connon in 1867, shows a timber slide over the dam at the Elora Mill.
Logs from Peel Township, hauled by sled in winter to Elora, went into the Grand below the falls each year during the 1850s. That technique was revived briefly in 1870. A sawmill at Galt purchased large quantities of logs in Peel during the winter of 1869-1870, to be delivered to the banks of the Grand below Elora in what is now Elora Gorge Park. The buyer floated that timber to Galt, completing the task in the first week of May.
Using the rivers to float timber caused conflicts with other users of the river, and over time a great deal of case law was written on the rights of loggers and of millers. It is safe to say that no lawyer in the county today has much familiarity with that aspect of law. Timber drives frequently damaged bridges, and could cause havoc with dams that were not constructed to pass logs. The old style wood dams, shaped in a cross-section like a ski-jump, were the best at being able to pass logs without damage. On the other hand, logs could pound away at the walls and foundations of mills on the banks of streams, resulting in structural damage. The log drive of 1870 was a particularly damaging one, leaving a string of damaged structures and threatened lawsuits.
The start of railway service to central and north Wellington caused a major disruption to the local logging industry. Some shippers chose rail to transport their logs to Hamilton and other centres where prices were better. During the early 1870s trainloads of saw logs rumbled south through Fergus and Elora, or east through Arthur and Grand Valley. And the railways themselves became significant purchasers of wood, mostly for fuel. The old inefficient steam locomotives were lucky to get more than 12 or 14 miles from a cord of wood.
Along with Hugh Black of Fergus, the Potter Brothers of Elora used the Grand for decades as a transportation route. The Potters, in most years through the 1870s and 1880s, floated between 1,000 and 3,000 logs to their mill. Some years the effort was not as successful as planned. In 1877 their boom across the river broke. Within a few hours all their logs – 1,500 that year – had passed over both Elora dams, buoyed by spring flood waters. D.M. Potter made rush arrangements to catch the timber at Galt. He sold it there, rather than pay to have it drawn back to Elora.
Driving logs on the rivers continued, though at an ever-reducing level, after 1900 on both the Grand and its tributaries. Ezra Wissler, when he was able to secure a supply of logs, floated them to his family’s sawmill in Salem, which had operated since the 1850s under his father’s management and then that of his brothers and himself.
On March 15, 1903, the logs, enmeshed in a jam of ice, took out the greater part of the upper Salem dam that supplied some of the power for the sawmill. That was the end of logging on the Irvine, and of the Wissler sawmill. Something of a stoic, Wissler is reported to have remarked to his daughter, “We are not worth a dam now,” as he watched the ice carry away his logs and dam.
The last Grand River log drive, it appears, ran in April of 1906. Fergus editor Hugh Templin devoted considerable time to investigating the subject of log drives; his grandfather, Hugh Black, was a central player in the sawmill industry in Wellington County in the late 19th century. Black, at various times, operated the large sawmill at Glenlamond, a few hundred yards upstream from the Scotland Street bridge at the east end of Fergus, and another directly across the river from Monkland Mills on the other side of the bridge.
According to Templin, Hugh Black last secured logs by the Grand River route in 1905. For the 1906 season he moved his operations to a location near Speedside, in a bush owned by L.W. Farrow. By then, the supply of usable logs from Luther and Amaranth had dwindled significantly, undermining the viability of the log drive.
From an economic point of view, the log drives were not an efficient way of moving saw logs. The drives persisted only as long as other alternatives were more expensive. Most commentators put the duration of employment for the crews at 14 to 20 days. A crew usually consisted of 12 to 15 men, each earning $1.50 to $2 per day. Then there were the expenses of feeding and lodging the crews.
There was all sorts of preparatory work, such as building and maintaining the booms across the river every five or six miles. Sawmill operators had to meet to plan the scheduling of the logs for their mills, which numbered from three up to eight on the stretch of river from Grand Valley to Elora.
Many of the logs became ensnared along the way or entangled in brush, and others escaped entirely, to be washed downstream. Those were dead losses. The areas being logged were farther and farther from the streams, adding additional transportation costs. And in the years after 1900, inflation and other employment opportunities made the recruitment of crews more difficult and more expensive. At the same time, other transportation methods, particularly rail, dropped considerably in price during that period.
That last Grand River drive, in 1906, involved logs for only one sawmill, that of Udney Richardson in Elora. In the early 1950s, Mrs. Mary Peden recalled that event. Richardson placed a boom across the river at the 8th Line of West Garafraxa to catch his logs and hold them for the night. Peden provided supper and lodging for four of Richardson’s crew. Richardson and the rest of his men went on to Belwood. She recalled the men, filthy and wet, sitting in her kitchen, pulling off their socks, and wringing them out on the floor, and drying and thawing themselves as they huddled around the kitchen stove. Their boots squished when they walked. The men slept two to a bed in their work clothes. Richardson paid Mrs. Peden $2 for supper and beds for the four men. “That was fine,” she recalled of the unexpected extra pin money.
Taking over the old Potter Brothers sawmill in what is now Elora’s Bissell Park, Udney Richardson made a valiant attempt at building a profitable lumbering business in the years immediately before and after 1900.
A West Garafraxa native, he had been active in the lumber business on the Grand for years, along with his father and brothers. In 1901 Richardson floated the equivalent of 500 cords of wood down the Grand, worth, he claimed, about $8,000. In 1904 he removed the machinery from the old saw mill building and set it up at the Elora Mill. He also purchased new equipment to make moldings and trim that year.
Richardson continued to operate the saw mill sporadically after that last log drive in 1906, receiving his logs by rail, wagon, sled and eventually by truck. In July 1943 a board jammed in the saw, and flew back against his abdomen. He died of the injuries three days after Christmas, taking with him much unrecorded detail and history of lumbering days on the Grand River.
*This column was originally published in the Advertiser on Nov. 3, 2006.