The Future of Logging Leaving the woods: Falling wages, mechanization threaten New England’s logging tradition

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Trucks loaded with timber felled by Canadian loggers barrel past Hilton Hafford’s unfinished log home along the St. John River.

In northern Maine, the tree-covered hills on both sides of the border have been logged since the early 19th century. So when Hafford, a third-generation lumberjack, had to leave to find better pay in the woods elsewhere, the change was wrenching.

“I never planned on leaving. But when the price of labor went down, you just couldn’t make a living doing it,” Hafford said, scuffing slippered feet along the cabin’s unfinished and bare wood floor. “Everyone has had to leave.”

Throughout northern New England, once plentiful logging jobs have fallen prey to low wages, mechanization and Canadian loggers who can make low wages go further because of the favorable exchange rate. The job losses are destroying a tradition dating to the days when the first lumberjacks felled mighty pines for the masts of sailing ships.

Hafford, who blockaded the U.S.-Canadian border with a dozen other loggers in 1998 to protest Canadians working in Maine, now commutes 10 hours to an apartment in Vermont and a job for small landowners. He returns to Allagash only when rain keeps him from working in the woods.

Once a thriving logging community, the town has dwindled from 680 inhabitants in 1950 to about 260 today. And many wonder how long loggers can go on cutting in the primitive and dark forest that fascinated Henry David Thoreau so long ago.

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Like farming in the Midwest, logging has passed through generations from father to son. For some, it has been a birthright realized while clinging to their fathers’ timber-worn hands and seeing the forest for the first time.

Increasingly, these men who entered the forest as children are graying, according to a University of Maine survey of 1,200 loggers.

The average age of a logger has risen in recent years to 45.6 in New Hampshire, 45 in Vermont, and 44.4 in Maine. About half of those surveyed were not optimistic about their prospects five years down the road.

The most telling statistic: More than two-thirds likely would not encourage their children to follow in their footsteps.

That might surprise outsiders, but those who work in the woods understand it well.

“Loggers don’t just appear at random. They come from logging families,” said Mitch Lansky, an author who has written about forest issues from his home in Wytopitlock. “And parents are telling their children, ‘Don’t get in the business.”‘

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recognizes logging as one of the nation’s most dangerous jobs. Parents who grew up working in the forest know it and insist there are better ways to make a living.

Troy Jackson, a logger who left the woods to become a Maine state lawmaker, refuses to take his children into the woods with him.

“Why would you want to crucify your kids by pushing them into a career where there is absolutely no benefit?” Jackson said, his voice cracking with emotion. “If they never come with me into the woods, they’ll never want to do it. I don’t want them to get the idea. It’s no good.”

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Legends live in the North Woods that Thoreau wrote about 150 years ago. Even then a working forest was being born, making riches for businessmen and luring woodsmen to hardscrabble logging camps.

Rivers like the Penobscot and Kennebec were so thick with logs in spring that you could walk across them. A 31-foot statue of Paul Bunyan resides in Bangor, once the largest shipping port for lumber in the state.

Over the years, peavey poles and oxen were replaced by chain saws and skidders. But in the last decade, those too have become relics in the new economy of the forest, where expensive heavy machinery keeps timber flowing.

With a row of hydraulic levers, a single man can do the work of many loggers, grabbing, felling, delimbing and chopping towering trees in minutes. While efficient, the expensive equipment has increased the overhead for independent contractors whose wallets are steadily shrinking.

Many are caught: Either they go out of business because they cannot afford to mechanize, or they do it, then struggle to make the payments.

In Colebrook, N.H., the rainbow of rusted logging machines strewn across acres of lots at Eddie Nash & Sons is the legacy of loggers who have left the woods and sold their equipment. Susan Nash runs the business office with mannerisms as gruff as the loggers she serves.

Steve Hannington, president of the American Loggers Council, says mechanization has been toughest on younger loggers.

“What we’ve seen is an increase in the capacity to harvest timber with fewer people. And what happens is the same as on a factory floor,” Hannington said. “Seniority rules.”

The son of a logger, Hannington, 43, works mostly from an office now. His own children are not planning lives in the woods or at Hannington Bros., the family logging business in Macwahoc.

With fewer jobs and fewer young loggers, Hannington dreads the day when the current generation grows weary and gives up.

“When we all decide to get out, it’s a crisis situation,” he said.

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As if the industry didn’t have enough troubles, some fear modern logging practices have irreparably damaged the North Woods. Maine, for example, allows clear-cuts of 250 acres if they are bordered with tree buffers.

Many places in the forest have been left bare-boned and raw as a result.

But loggers such as Hal Burhoe, 55, of Jay know the forests will come back. The son of a logger, he has seen forests throughout New England cut down and grow again.

“The first time my father saw a skidder he said, ‘There goes the wood business. It’s the beginning of the end,'” Burhoe said with a laugh.

The wood business has not ended. Despite caustic predictions that one day there will be no more trees, logging goes on. Mechanization and Canadian labor are signs of evolution in an industry constantly trying to swallow itself and the forest with it.

“Logging will never end,” Burhoe said, pushing up wire-framed glasses with gnarled fingers. “Logging as we know it will.”