Century ago lumbermen battled paper giant

Lumbermen and lawyers from all over Maine gathered in a Bangor courtroom near the end of January 1904, to see whether Great Northern Paper Co. would be held responsible for one of the premier disasters in the state’s logging history. In the river drive of 1901, millions of feet of spruce were lost to ice and floods because of delays in getting the wood down the various tributaries and lakes of the Penobscot River to the Bangor area.

“The Great Log Case Now in Court” blared a large headline at the top of Page One of the Bangor Daily News on Jan. 30. It had taken two years for the case to get into a courtroom, and it would take two more to get a decision.

The legal skirmish was only one episode in a protracted struggle involving the Legislature and the courts over who would control the dams and the water level on the river – the huge paper mill that had recently taken up residence on Millinocket Stream or the downriver lumbermen. While the mill needed water power for manufacturing paper, the lumbermen needed it to get their logs to the sawmills around Bangor.

Similar conflicts had occurred on other Maine rivers, but on the Penobscot it became particularly noisy and ugly. The Penobscot Log Driving Co., an association of the area’s logging interests, had had the exclusive right since 1846 to drive logs coming into the West Branch between Chesuncook Lake and where the East Branch joins the river at Medway to any place at or above the Penobscot Boom north of Old Town.

GNP had moved to take over the drive and dominate the company after it set up shop in 1899. Through a compromise worked out in the Legislature after a complex round of political negotiations and maneuvers, GNP got control of the drive in 1901 and immediately tried to sabotage it, the lumbermen charged.

The world’s biggest paper mill was just a creation of the infamous trusts, grumbled editorial writers and other critics of big business. Indeed, wasn’t Col. Oliver H. Payne, one of the largest stockholders in the Standard Oil Company, also one of GNP’s big economic backers? Joseph Pulitzer, William C. Whitney, Pierpont Morgan and other big names also were among the investors. It was enough to make any small-time capitalist competitor a little nervous at the turn of the last century.

In this particular lawsuit, one of several that had grown from the 1901 drive, the plaintiffs were Herbert W. Marsh and Fred W. Ayer, local lumbermen. Ayer was a well-known figure in the area, having introduced the band saw and other innovations to Maine sawmills and logging operations. He also was no stranger to scheming. In the early 1890s, he had caused some consternation when he tried to corner the Bangor log market.

Marsh and Ayer accused GNP of delaying the drive especially in Chesuncook Lake and again between North Twin Dam and Quakish Lake by diverting water for its mill, causing the loss of more than a million feet, or about a quarter of their logs in the West Branch drive. Instead of getting their logs to the Penobscot Boom to be sorted in August or September, which had always been the case in the past, they didn’t arrive until Nov. 13, when the river froze up early and a NEWS headline writer declared, “West Branch Drive Hits Town on Snowshoes.” During thaws in December and in the spring, freshets carried many of the logs down river and out to sea where they were lost.

A drought in the fall had also contributed to the mess. But that was no excuse, argued the plaintiffs. GNP should have foreseen the possibility of such weather-related events as drought and floods and taken advantage of optimal conditions earlier in the season.

The Maine Supreme Court agreed with Marsh and Ayer in a decision issued in 1906. GNP was guilty of “mismanagement, either through negligence or malfeasance.” The company was ordered to pay the plaintiffs $9,871.31, about half the amount they claimed to have lost.

Other claims were settled out of court. The lumbermen had won this round in their battle with the hulking behemoth of the north woods. But they had already begun to lose the war to a variety of forces beyond their control.

“The court case really marked the end of Penobscot River driving as it had been known since the 1830s. True, logs came down the river still but in smaller and smaller amounts, and after awhile only from the Mattawamkeag or the East Branch,” according to David Smith in his “History of Lumbering in Maine, 1861-1960,” an invaluable account of the circumstances surrounding the case. “The last of the long logs appeared in 1928 when not quite a million feet came to the Jordan Lumber Company in Old Town. The last of the pulp wood came down in 1953, although there were years in the thirties in which no wood at all appeared in the boom.”

“The old river, as they say in Bangor, ran and still runs rolling to the sea. It didn’t, and somehow still doesn’t seem right to meet log trucks along the river road and see the river itself sparkling in the sun, empty and just a bit lonely,” wrote Smith in his 1972 book.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.