When the ice age ended some 12,000 (plus or minus) years ago, the face of the Adirondacks had undergone major changes. The mountains were lower and rounded now, worn down by ice a mile thick. More than 2,000 lakes had been formed in the remolded landscape. The glacier had also formed two major drainage basins for the more than 100,000 miles of flowing waterways. To the east, west, and north, rivers would lead to the St. Lawrence, while the Hudson River carried offwaters to the south. You will agree with me, then, that it was not surprising that when the timber barons began eyeing the forests of this region for its merchantable lumber, the proximity of rivers was an important consideration in evaluating what land they should buy. In short, the waterways offered a solution to the problem of transporting the timbers to downstream mills and was vital to the success of any lumber operation at the time (1860) when no other suitable transportation means were available.
The lumbermen also needed land that contained dense stands of spruce and pine, both of which held the highest market value. These species had several advantages. Not only did they plane well, but both had good strength and a close, straight grain. Another advantage was that they would float and could thus be transported long distances to the mill. (Hardwood does not float and it would be years before it was discovered that it made splendid paper, etc.) Many local streams provided this transportation link. Jenkins Brook, the Bog River, Bear Brook, Round Pond stream, Grindstone Brook, Cold River, Moose Creek, Calkins Creek, and the Racquette River are some of the tributaries that allowed logs to be driven (floated) to the lake to be rafted and towed to the Sorting Gap on the river, where the logs were sorted as to owner and as to their ultimate destination, either further downstream or to the mills on Racquette Pond.
One of the earliest river drives locally was on Round Pond stream, or Little Tupper outlet as it is also known. As many readers know, this vibrant and beautiful stream joins the Bog River at a location locally called “The Forks” before spilling over Bog River Falls into Tupper Lake. Here the logs would be towed by boats down the lake as far as Pages Bluff. (Note: A boom consisted of large logs, some thirty feet long, firmly fastened end to end by chains attached to ropes passed through holes bored by an auger. The boom would confine the saw logs or pulp into a raft.)
The logs on that first river drive were cut on lands owned by former Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney and his partner, a crafty Glens Falls lumberman named Patrick Moynihan. Their holdings, later known as Whitney Park, were accomplished by buying many small parcels a little at a time at an average cost of under $4 per acre. When the first cut was initiated in 1896, they had acquired 68,000 acres (which would eventually grow to almost 100,000 acres). An agreement was in place in which the two men would share expenses and profits in this first lumbering, and Whitney would succeed as sole owner after the lumbering was completed. William died in 1904 and the partnership was continued by his son, Harry Payne Whitney, until its dissolution in 1912.
About this time, other regions that had been lumbered earlier had begun to see a decline in the accessible timber resources. The pine was mostly gone, and the spruce was not growing back at a rate faster than that being harvested, due to a failure to cut selectively to insure a new crop in a reasonable amount of time. Also, new state laws of 1885 and 1894 locked up many acres of timber in the Forest Preserve, adding to the exhaustion of this valuable resource. Wealthy landowners, aware of these shortcomings and having vision that went well beyond their lifetimes, began to explore and become among the first to utilize scientific management of their operations.
Seward Webb, at Nehasane in 1893, employed European-trained foresters Gifford Pinchot (The Adirondack Spruce) and his protege, Henry Graves (Practical Forestry in the Adirondacks), to “cut as much timber as possible without injuring the productive power of the forest.” Whitney and Moynihan followed the lead of their neighbor, Webb, and hired Graves to prepare a plan for the first cut on this largely virgin tract. While it didn’t contain the 43 percent proportion of spruce found on Nehasane, it had, nevertheless, dense stands of both pine and spruce that had never seen the woodsman’s axe. (Some of the spruce had been destroyed by bark borers in 1860 — “He lives on pitch, the son of a bitch.”) We will look at Graves’ plan in a future article noting, meanwhile, that the death of a million forest patriarchs, some over 200 feet tall with a diameter of six and a half feet, was close at hand.
Timber is, of course, a renewable resource, a necessary product to fill the many and varied needs of a growing nation. Nevertheless, it must have been a sublimely sobering and impressive experience, even to the most hardened woodsman, as one of these giants that had survived the dramatic forces of nature for hundreds of years would, with a quiver, a shudder, and a quaking, surrender with a final groan to the forces of man.