to waste. The logs would have to be sawn by the middle of the
following summer to retain their value. Tinker hadn’t wanted to
get into the business of sawing lumber, but the clock was ticking
and NETSA began contracting with sawyers.
Many New England lumbermen felt threatened by the
government competing with them, and rumors spread about
NETSA planning to dump low-priced lumber into a market that
had finally been stimulated by the need to repair and rebuild
after Thirty-Eight’s wholesale destruction. Tinker and his Forest
Service crew met with industry leaders, including the heads of
two trade associations – the Northeast Lumber Manufacturers
Association and New England Lumbermen’s Association – at
the Toy Town Tavern in Winchendon, Massachusetts, and the
working group became known as the Winchendon Committee.
It hammered out an agreement spelling out the terms of the
sawing program and publicized it to quell the rumors. Logs
would stay in the ponds indefinitely, and only the logs at the
four hundred–plus dry sites would be sawn. After sawing, the
lumber would be stored at the mill site until a buyer could be
found for the entire site. NETSA mills sawed the lumber square
edge because it was to be marketed outside of New England
– south to the Potomac and west to the Mississippi – so it
wouldn’t compete directly with the New England mills, which
would presumably be purchasing the logs from the ponds to saw
into lumber for local markets.
NETSA advertised widely for loggers and owners of portable
mills to come to New England, and it was soon under contract
with sawyers who trucked in portable mills from throughout
the region and beyond, including New York, Pennsylvania,
Michigan, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
Jim Colby’s father, Joe, retrieved his mill, which had sat idle
for the previous decade in Northfield, New Hampshire, and
joined the legion of sawyers. The Colbys set up that mill in
Concord’s Rollins Park, whose old pines had been destroyed.
Joe Colby may not have agreed with federal government’s scaling or grading practices, but he knew a good business opportunity when he saw it, and he quickly bought another mill, then
another, until he ultimately had seven mills sawing up hurricane
logs. He set up mills at dry sites in Canterbury, Boscawen, and
Concord. He also sawed the logs stored in Clough Pond in
Canterbury, Deermeadow Pond in Epsom, the Bay in Salisbury,
and at the Girl Scout camp on Lake Tarleton in Piermont.
At two of the mills, Colby sawed square-edge lumber for
NETSA at its going rate of $7.50 per thousand board feet. But
at the other sites, he sawed round-edge lumber. At Clough
Pond and Deermeadow Pond, he sawed on contract with New
England Box Company, which bought the logs at the NETSA
scale and made out well.
Jim Colby explained how that worked. “If there was 100,000
board feet in the pond scaled by the government, it overran
25 percent, and New England Box got that 25 percent because
the government sold them whatever was scaled in that pond. It
worked out for us because we got paid so much per thousand
to do it, and it worked out for them because they got the extra
money.” So it turns out that the swindle stick worked to the box
companies’ benefit. All told, the Colbys’ mills sawed more than
fifteen million board feet.
Over in Vermont, which had fewer ponds to choose from,
one of the dry sites was in Bradford at Wentworth Blodgett’s,
who leased eight acres to NETSA. It had to be that large to store
logs, set up a sawmill, store sawn lumber, and store sawdust and
slabs. The rent was a dollar a year plus a portion of the sawdust
and slabs. Logs were skidded there from the Blodgetts’ and three
other neighboring farms. I could find no records to indicate
whether logs were delivered by truck to the site from other
owners in the vicinity, but given that Bradford and Newbury
had significant blowdown, we have to assume that it bought logs
from beyond the four farms.
Fifty years later, Wentworth’s son, Put Blodgett, was curi-
ous about the huge event from his childhood, which led him
to Ken Stockman, who had helped salvage the logs. Stockman
responded to Blodgett with a letter explaining how it went. His
father, Harold, ran the operation for the Blodgetts and the three
other farmers. He hired five or six men to go into the woods
with their axes and crosscut saws. The workday lasted nine
hours, which earned a man three dollars a day. Blodgett’s father
purchased an Allis Chalmers Model M crawler tractor designed
for hauling logs, and Ken Stockman was given the job of run-
ning it. The crew started in late October, and the cutters worked
their way through the tangles of trees and began to convert what
they could into logs. Another man, a Finn from Corinth, used
two horses to skid the logs out to skidways where they could be
loaded on scoots for the crawler to pull to the landing.
A scoot was essentially a sled with two eight-foot-long elm
runners and a pair of heavy bunks that could hold eight hun-
dred to a thousand board feet of pine. Stockman would deliver
an empty scoot to one of the skidways and then go pick up a
loaded scoot at another. As driver, he didn’t have to load the
scoot, but he did have to unload it at the landing. He wrote, “In
order to keep up with the cutters, there was no time to loiter.
On the trip back from the landing you opened the throttle wide
open and let it go.” Stockman guessed that in six months, they
salvaged between half a million and three quarters of a mil-
lion board feet, “not bad for a bunch of mostly amateurs and
considering the conditions we had to work under.” It turns out
that he underestimated; NETSA records show that it purchased
849,000 board feet at Vermont’s Dry Site number 10. Stockman’s
crew finished logging in April as mud season kicked in, just
after a man arrived from New York with a portable mill. This
was typical of the way the work progressed everywhere. Across
the region, any man with the slightest logging experience could
find a job. Besides the dangerous work, they suffered through a
snowy winter. Jim Colby worked with the crew at Lake Tarleton
Girls’ Camp that winter. “We had thirty-four men chopping and
logging, and four teams of horses. We’d shovel our way in in the
morning and get in there about eleven o’clock and we’d shovel
our way out at night. Oh, that was a terrible winter,” he said.
Despite the difficulties, most of the logs were delivered by
July 1939, with a peak of 110 million board feet delivered in
March 1939. NETSA continued to accept logs until June 1940,
