Jim Lyons is an engineer with the NYS DEC, Bureau of Design and Construction. Early this winter, after two abortive attempts due to adverse weather conditions, he found himself a the Mt. Arab trail head, preparing to climb the 2,539-foot summit.
His assignment was to evaluate the Mt. Arab tower for structural integrity to insure its safety for public use.
The weather was favorable — clear skies with moderate temperatures — but Jim faced another problem: Someone had not returned his snowshoes to the state vehicle he had driven. Undaunted, he decided to climb without them and, in near knee-deep snow, laboriously “post-holed” his way up the new trail laid out this summer by members of the Friends of Mt. Arab, the DEC Region 6 and the St. Lawrence County Youth Conservation Corp.
The tower on Mt. Arab was erected in 1918 and has an interesting history. It’s an artifact from a time when human diligence alone worked to stop disastrous forest fires such as those in 1903 and 1908 that together destroyed almost one million acres.
The world that built that tower and others like it is gone, but the towers remain a link to our history. Some, such as the one at Mt. Arab, deserve to be restored and preserved so that future generations may gain insight into the past.
A part of the background for that first observation station on Mt. Arab is provided by a historical booklet about the Grasse River Club compiled by Charles Chappell of Syracuse.
Older readers may remember the prominent department store in Syracuse called Chappell’s, which was as famous as Macy’s or Gimbel’s in my day. Charles Chappell was a member of the Grasse River Outing Club, located on lands leased from the Emporium Lumber Company owned by the Sykes family of Conifer. (Mr. Chappell’s brother-in-law was Clyde Sykes, son of founder W.L. Sykes.)
Chappell quotes Frank Curtin, an early member (1912): Once the campers were driven out of camp by a forest fire. The fire ranger came into camp on horseback one afternoon about 4:30 p.m. in late July and warned everyone to leave at once. The fire at the time was raging in the forest near the New York Central Rail Road at Horse Shoe (sic) Station and pond and was heading towards camp. We all left by team for Childwold Station to take the train to Utica.
The paint on the cars was badly burned and scorched as we passed through the flames near Horse Shoe. A Dr. Webb owned a large fenced in preserve at the He-ha-sa-ne and after the fire a carcass of a bull moose was found near the fence. This is the only moose that I ever heard of being near the camp. Due to a shift in the wind, the fire did not reach the camp or preserve.
Peter Welsh, local author and former historian at the Smithsonian Institute, further tells me that “the fire became a ‘wake-up call’ to the Emporium owners. With 60,000 acres of virgin hardwood stands and 17,000 acres that had never been cut for either hard or soft wood and a total acreage some 110,000 acres, early detection became extremely important, and in 1916 they erected a wooden tower on Mt. Arab’s summit.”
Peter also noted that “this provided a commanding view of over 100,000 acres or more with Tupper Lake in view to the southeast, the Racquette River valley to the north and Horseshoe Lake Wild Forest to the southwest.” It also provided observation of the company-owned Grasse River Railroad that ran from Conifer to Cranberry Lake and, with its North Tram line to Clare, reached a total of more than 100 miles of track.
The state replaced the wooden tower about 1918 with a forty-foot steel tower. The design and components of that tower were the genius of a Midwestern wind mill company and was known as an Aermotor Model 40.
It is similar to other familiar state-owned towers, differing only in height and configuration specific to their relative location and fabricated from equal leg steel angles. A standard observer’s cabin was located at the top of this steel structure and was a seven-foot cube that could accommodate the observer and four others around a table with a surface map properly oriented with a movable sighting rod or locator called an alidade, which allowed the observer to more accurately pinpoint the location of any smoke or fire detected.
Incidentally, those early observers were paid the princely sum of 40 cents an hour. A tower, exclusive of labor costs, ran about $500. Today’s replacement cost? About $30,000.
With the advent of tighter restrictions, large fires became a thing of the past. The reality was that only one or two fires were being reported yearly from the towers. One study in 1960 found that it would cost $57,000 to maintain seven fire towers compared to a cost of $20,000 to hire airplanes to watch for fires.
As a result, the fire towers were gradually phased out. None of the thirty-three remaining towers are manned today.
Of seven towers in St. Lawrence County, only eighty-year-old Mt. Arab remains. Howard “Woody” Wood was its last lookout. He retired in the late 1980s.
The Mt. Arab tower was put on the National Historic Lookout Registry. Unfortunately, this offered no real protection against removal, unlike the protection granted should it be included in the National Register of Historical Places such as that enjoyed by the Beth Joseph Synagogue. An application for this registry is presently being finalized and will be based on established criteria for eligibility.
Meanwhile a group of concerned citizens and interested organizations are forging ahead with plans to preserve and restore the fire tower and observer’s cabin to safe and usable condition.
If the tower is to be used by the public, structural integrity becomes of prime importance.
Jim Lyons has prepared a very thorough report that runs to five pages and includes recommendations and cost estimates. Two comments from this report may be of interest.
Lyons notes: The tower was inspected and evaluated on two distinct but interrelated grounds. Namely, present condition and past performance versus what we expect from the structure for the next 80 years. On one hand, we have the fact that the tower has performed adequately for many decades. Such cursory observation often inspires one to surmise that “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” On the other hand anyone who has bent a paper clip back and forth enough times, whether they realize it or not, received an elementary lesson in metal fatigue. Wind loading, the primary force affecting fire towers and similar tall, slender structures, is a powerful and persistent cyclic load. For this reason, modern computer analysis of the structure was performed in conjunction with conventional wisdom and observation to arrive at a recommended course of action.
A digital drawing was developed using AutoCAD-Release 13 from measurements taken in the field. This information in turn was used to model the structure using the Rapid Interactive Analysis - 3 Dimensional (RSISA-3D) program, version 3.01.
Jim went on to note: When the actual buckling in the field is compared to that predicted by the computer model, a few interesting issues arise. Actual damage patterns seem to indicate that the strongest winds impacting the structure are from the south, west, and southwest as one might expect. Secondary winds sufficient to damage select members may also hail from the north. Atypical buckling in a few locations suggests a redistribution of forces and/or racking of the structure due to extreme wind perhaps approaching 100 mph! This last comment is strictly hypothetical. I was surprised to find evidence of buckling in the diagonals of Tier 5, however. A thick bustle of ice prevented me from confirming buckling in this tier — a condition that is not supported by the computer model. At least not an 80 mph wind speed. If buckling can be confirmed at this level, and assuming that my model is sufficiently accurate, it would mean one of, or a combination of, each of two scenarios has played out on the tower on Mt. Arab. A bare tower, as modeled, would have to experience winds in excess of 100 mph to sufficiently stress and buckle the diagonals of Tier 5. Another possibility is that the stairs, screens and individual members of the tower can become iced over, in effect becoming a “sail” against the wind. This condition could compound the effect of even low speed winds. Simulating these conditions in the model produced deformation in the fifth tier.
Lyons concludes his report with this comment: This is a beautiful, well thought out structure that has stood the test of time. But given that, I also found it to be a very efficient design. This is to say that it was not constructed conservatively but rather with specific members in precisely the right size, shape, configuration and quantity. Their individual integrity must be preserved if the tower system as a whole is to be preserved. I developed quite a respect for the various towers I’ve inspected and the now nameless/faceless designer(s) of the Aermotor Company that produced this tower back in 1918. It is with this spirit that this inspection and analysis took place. And it is with this spirit that all facets of the rehabilitation and subsequent routine maintenance should proceed.