Marjorie (Hood) Bell
One
My first experience of working in lumbering camps was in 1939. My father put a crew in back of Second Magaguadavic Lake cutting hardwood. I went along to cook for a small crew of seven men. My daughter, who was two at the time, accompanied me.
The camp was built out of logs cut on the spot and were full of frost as it was in January. I can remember that we all got terrible colds as the heat kept drawing the frost out of the logs. Everything seemed damp - even the beds. All the sleeping quarters were built up high as the floors were so cold. We had two stoves; one for cooking and one as a heater that had to be kept fuelled all night. You could hear the trees snapping with the frost which sounded like gun shots.
There was a hovel where the horses and fodder were kept.
It was up early in the morning as the men got up early to feed and water the horses. As the crews cut, the teams hauled the logs to Farm Point where later a mill was brought in to saw them.
Bread was made over night with the old fashioned cake yeast and baked the next day. It kept me busy cooking and keeping the fires burning with the green wood.
Washing wasn't easy as the water had to be carried from a spring close by and heated in a boiler. The laundry was scrubbed on a washboard with "Surprise Soap" (which was made in St. Stephen) and then hung outside. It was later brought in frozen to be dried inside.
All the dishes and utensils were tin or enamel ware. The table was reset after every meal.
Two
My next experience in a pulp camp was four miles back of Magaguadavic Lake later that same year. This was a much larger camp with a larger crew.
We walked in after crossing the lake, carrying our two year old daughter and two kittens (called Frisky and Dopey).
The camp was in two sections with a "dingle" in between where a great barrel of molasses rested on its side with a bung hole at the lowest side. A barrel of salted beef and one of salted pork was also found in the dingle. This salted meat had to be soaked overnight before it was edible. It could be boiled or fried. Sometimes this was supplemented by a moose or a deer. Occasionally, we would have a ham.
All the vegetables were a canned variety whereas the fruit, such as apricots, apples, and prunes were dried and came in big flat wooden boxes. The fruit had to soak overnight and then be cooked.
The empty fruit boxes were used by the men to carry their lunch to the woods. A rope was put through one side for carrying.
Everything came in by horses and a scout wagon. A scout wagon consisted of the front wheels of a sloven wagon with two poles trailing. Since the trail was terribly rough with big granite rocks to travel over, a four-wheeled vehicle couldn't have made it.
We had a cookee who looked after the wood, water and other things that needed doing. I also had a girl to help me. Bread was made twice a day. We set one batch in the afternoon to be a sponge. Later that night it was thickened and left to raise over night. Early in the morning this batch of bread was baked. This process was repeated daily.
A great big iron pot of beans was made every day. As all the men carried their lunches, we had all day to do the work. Often, however, the Scalers and sometimes the Game Wardens would drop in during the day. Mercifully, they never caught us with illegal meat.
In this crew, there were 27-30 men. There were no power saws then, so the men used a cross-cut saw with a man on each end. Two men cut down, limbed, and peeled the tree. One man yarded out to a yard where two more men sawed it up into 4 foot lengths. There were several of these five-man crews working in different areas. This lumber was all hauled to a roadside that three or four men had spent all summer spotting out, cutting trees and dynamiting rocks in preparation for a winter road.
The winter road was iced by a huge water tank that was filled several times at spring holes along the route. This icing took place at night so it could freeze. This process was repeated nightly until the roads had been levelled out for the trucks to haul the lumber to Farm Point. It was a hard job to keep the road on the lake open as it drifted badly.
My Dad was kept busy filing saws for the men.
We went to the logging camp May 17 and by July 1 the crew had cut 1000 cord. By this time the peeling was done as the sap in the trees had dried up.
The men spent Sunday doing their wash.
Three
Another session in a camp was a Mill Camp where we had anywhere from 30-40 hungry men. My husband John, accompanied me to this camp where he helped me along with keeping three stoves going with slab wood (green) and getting water from an outside pump.
It was up at five a.m. and lights out at ten p.m. We always had the table ready for the next day's breakfast before we went to bed that night. Bacon and sausage was also in the pan ready to be cooked.
They were a hungry bunch. The Mill Wright came at 10 a.m. for a lunch for the men at the mill, and another lunch at bedtime.
Again it was two batches of bread, white and chocolate doughnuts, eight pies, dessert, and huge pans of cakes daily. We cooked a whole quarter of pork at a time. There was a meat house nearby where the meat was kept frozen as this was in January to March. We were able to use both fresh and canned vegetables and fruit at this camp.