USA > Vermont > Windham County > Rockingham > History of the town of Rockingham, Vermont, including the villages of Bellows Falls, Saxtons River, Rockingham, Cambridgeport and Bartonsville, 1907-1957 with family genealogies > Part 7
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In 1909, J. P. Riley who was made assistant to the president of the I. P. Co., in 1915, was sent from the local mills to Grand Falls, Newfoundland to superintend the opening of a mill built by Lord Northcliffe of England. Several local employees accompanied him to the new mill which made a world record for newspaper the week it was opened. Among these were Matt Bailey and Fred Whittaker, both later returning to Bellows Falls. Miss Ethel Buckman, stepdaughter of Mr. Whittaker and her mother, accompanied him and Miss Buckman was asked to substitute for three months for a school teacher who was snowed in. She remained for two years and later taught for
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thirty-five years at the Hampton Institute for colored (and at that time, Indian) young people at Hampton, Virginia. She now resides in Bellows Falls. Mr. Riley was also in New York for several years with the company and left Bellows Falls when the mills were closed, going to Duluth, Michigan in 1927-1928. He died in a Boston Hospital in 1928 at the age of seventy three.
There are still paper mills in Bellows Falls, the famous "paper mill town" of fifty years ago. In 1908 the Robertson Paper Co. was making tissue paper. This mill was sold by C. E. and L. J. Robertson to F. H., G. H., and J. E. Babbitt with George Babbitt as the superintendent. For many years it was run by John Babbitt. The Bellows Falls Machine Co. was formed from the Osgood & Barker Company and merged with Robertson Paper in 1909. The controlling interest in Robert- son's was bought in 1937 by Sam Lewis of Rhode Island, from the John Babbitt estate. This was originally the Coy Paper Co., later of Claremont, N. H.
The Monarch Paper Co. was organized by H. F. and E. W. Kelley in the old Pulp Plaster building, to melt and save the wax from wax paper in the Robertson mill in 1919. It burned February 1920 and again on January 26, 1922 in a disastrous $20,000 fire with the buildings filled with wax paper and the water pressure low. It was purchased in 1935 by Hardy Merrill. The Blake & Higgins mill, in the town of Westminster, was auctioned off by that town in 1940, sold to Walter Hadley and bought by the Green Mountain Tissue Co. the same year to make sanitary facial tissues. This was purchased by Frederick Vogel of Berlin, N. H. and Allen Nadeau of North Brookfield, Mass.
The Fall Mountain Pad & Paper Co. was formed by members of the Moore & Thompson Co. and was sold to a Boston concern in 1923. This was the first mill to be completely electrified which took place in 1914. It was run by H. B. Underhill for eight years. The Moore & Thompson mill was sold to the Eagle Paper Co. of New York in February, 1921 and in December, repurchased by the former owners to make heavy Kraft papers. It was sold to the Hudson Bag Company in 1922 to make Kraft Bagging. Moore & Thompson and Hudson Bag factory closed in 1932 as they could get no tax exemption from the town. Today this is the Hudson Pulp & Paper Company.
In 1910 there was also the John T. Moore & Son paper mill which was later sold to the I. P. company and traded to Fred Babbitt after the '27 flood and which became known as the Babbitt-Kelley mill. Wyman Flint & Son's mill was sold to the Claremont Paper which discontinued after the disastrous '27 flood which flooded out most of the mills "under the hill." Also in 1910 were listed the Rockingham Paper Co. and the Katahdin Pulp Co. which were not manufacturers. In 1930
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Reginald Switzer opened an office as wholesale distributor of office and school furniture and paper, the Mt. Kilburn Paper Co., Inc.
The Wool Pullery was owned and operated by B. P. and E. F. O'Connor who purchased the Claremont Paper mill in 1935 for this purpose thus preventing the building from being torn down to save taxes. In 1941 the business was sold to Walker & Co. of Boston and moved to the Liberty Paper building where the out-put was raised from 3,000 skins per week to 3,000 per day, employing 50 to 60 people. In 1950 it changed hands again when Winslow Bros. & Smith of Boston took it over and remodeled the plant at a cost of $75,000. Built about 1921 of steel and re-inforced concrete with large window areas, the plant, when renovated, formed an ideal location. It is one of eleven owned by this firm in New England and New York State. The plant handles from 8,000 to 10,000 hides weekly. Sheep- skins arrive from South America, Africa and Australia mostly and are tanned and cleaned in the local plant before being shipped to manufacturers. For washing the hides, six pits with 19 wooden vats and paddle wheels were dug in the basement, each of which holds 4,000 gallons of water and 500-800 sheep hides at once with the exception of two vats used in the process of shearing. An extension was begun in 1951 for a two-story cement block structure for the storage of hides and for office space. (This business closed in 1958.)
LIVERY STABLES TO GAS PUMPS
Recently a news item announced that an Indiana firm today produces and sells some 300 surreys, sulkies, pony carts and phaetons a year. It may be, as the newspaper suggested, that we are still in the horse and buggy days! For most of us, how- ever, those days are but a memory although fifty years ago the livery stable was the center of a village, the only place aside from the general store and the blacksmith shop, where the heart of the community beat strong and lustily, where rich and poor mingled on a common level. A tipped-back chair at the livery stable was probably the greatest leveler of any people since Demosthenes orated to his Greek neighbors. Here politics held their own and the state of the union was settled each day. But by 1918 both W. W. I and the livery stable were things of the past and the horsy smells of leather, ammonia and oats, seeping blissfully from open doors, were gone. In its place today are the twin odors of gasoline and oil, aromas which would put any good horse to shame.
In a century of such speeded-up progress as ours, it was inevitable that this should happen just as it is inevitable that the gas buggy should replace the horse and the jet plane, at
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some not-too-future day, the automobile. Today the democrats and buckboards are left to moulder in the back field or scattered among antique shops from Dan to Beersheba. No longer does the preacher rent a horse for his pastoral calls or the doctor drive his weary nag into the livery stable. No drummer makes arrangements for a "rig" for a day on the road. No longer do horses stomp in the stalls and munch hay in the mangers.
In 1918 the Christian Science Monitor, reminiscing over the past, said "The livery stable was the last remnant of the stage- coach period-where to be received into the barn crowd was a distinction. The livery stable was the center of democracy- there was no better place to gage the trend of public opinion than the livery stable office." It mentioned the old signs which read, LIVERY AND BOARDING STABLE, HORSES FOR SALE OR CARRIAGES AND BUGGIES FOR HIRE. It went on to say that there is nothing in a garage to invite politi- cians; that things moved too fast now and that the old, unhurried, leisurely pace of the horse and buggy days was gone. Now there were red pumps, fast service-and something missing. Forty years later, the vision of the old livery stable is indeed a dim dream as the red pumps multiply and exude an ever stronger aroma.
Like any town and village of its day, Bellows Falls and all of Rockingham supported several livery stables at various times, among them Brosnahan's on Bridge Street later owned by Fred C. Rand and formerly by Ernest Crosier, on the site of the Green Mt. Power Co. today. Behind what is now the First National Store, was Frost's livery, probably the last to survive, dissolving in 1919. Here, in the days before school buses, country children left their teams for the day and it still furnished an occasional doctor with a buggy in mud time when a car would go hub-deep on an April road. But that was the end. Since 1906 it had belonged to H. W. Trowbridge. Henry S. Frost ran the stable for 34 years.
For more than fifty years L. T. Lovell & Son ran a stable on the site today occupied by the block north of the fire station on Rockingham Street. Here a supply of hacks was always on hand for weddings, christenings and funerals. Here, as in all stables, was a four-horse coach ready for Sunday School picnics at Lake Warren or Spofford and which was hung like a stage- coach with lengthwise seats, a little flight of steps up the back and the high driver's seat in front and which rocked like a boat when loaded. Winters there was the big four-horse sled also with lengthwise seats and the bottom full of straw and blankets for sleigh rides and dances at Chester, Cambridgeport, Walpole or Alstead. It was the day of the gay horse blankets with in- triguing names like Cherokee Prince, Apache Square, Duluth Fancy Plaid and Rockway Fancy. For special occasions there
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was the famous barouche, low-slung like a Victoria, for which Mrs. L. C. Lovell saved all the gold pieces which came into the till until she had $1500. Probably the most memorable occasion on which this handsome vehicle was used was when "Teddy" Roosevelt made his famous visit here in September, 1902. His private car was met at the station by the barouche and he was carried through packed streets to Morgan's Field where he addressed 15,000 people from a bunting-draped platform. When Teddy made his second appearance here in 1912, the honor of toting him through town must have gone to the Crosier stable as his widow remembers distinctly such an event.
Lovell's stable was the dispenser of all kinds of horse medi- cine about 1900. It was the sole agent for Sloan's liniment in town, that turpentiney cure for, originally, equine aches and pains and which was later transferred to humans in diluted form. People brough in their sick animals for diagnosis and treatment to Mr. L. T. Lovell, a big man with a white beard and big hands which were knowing with animals in the days when the term "veterinary" was little known but "farrier" was used instead. Livery stables advertised "horse clipping and dentistry" and if a horse had pneumonia or a lame leg, you rubbed him for hours with the famous liniment. When state law made it necessary for a man to acquire a degree to practise veterinary medicine, it was allowed that the old farriers, long-practising in their communities, be able to continue their work as long as they lived. Among the men who worked at this stable was Fred A. Strong who drove the old depot hack from 1899 to 1920 and who died in 1943.
Closely connected with the livery stables were the carriage- makers of which there were several in town. In 1888 George French moved his shop in from Grafton to Westminster Street along with his ten-room house, each piece marked and replaced but it did not come by ox cart as tradition has it. This was later the site of the Zeno bakery. Mr. French and his son George made carriages, sleighs and wood sleds at the French shop until automobiles drove most of the business away, the building was sold in 1921 and a smaller shop built behind the home. Here the younger Mr. French kept his hand in by painting cars and trucks and doing repair work, retiring about 1932 from ill health. He died in 1940.
Orrin H. Whitman was a carriagemaker as well as carpet cleaner and for many years ran a shop connected with Wood's blacksmith shop on Rockingham Street, where the Miss Bellows Falls Diner stands today. When he died in 1934, aged 90 years, he was the longest in continuous business of any man in town. He was a professional in every kind of wooden work connected with his trade which was used in its broadest sense as- every kind of wheeled or sledded vehicle found its way to his door when it needed repairs. He was especially in demand at the
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livery stables where he could replace a broken felly, spoke, hound or reach. Small boys delighted to watch him at work when the blacksmith shop palled on them and if they came within pinching distance, Mr. Whitman playfully nipped their arms or legs. He was 60 years a wheelwright on Rockingham Street and his father and grandfather were in the same business in the same shop for 55 years. When automobiles ruined his trade, he turned to cabinetmaking.
Blacksmithing was another craft closely allied with the livery stables and Wood's smithy was run for 45 years after- ward by Jack Lloyd who came there when he was 21 years old. At one time George Edwards was also owner of the shop and teamster for many years for the Vermont Farm Machine Co. He was also coachman for N. G. Williams and always brought his buggy around in style to the office of the Vermont Farm at dinner time, carrying him back and forth all day from home to office and back again. A blacksmith for 60 years on Rocking- ham Street was John Nolette in his shop near the Frost Livery stable, the oldest of the business men when he died in 1934 at the age of 90 and whose father and grandfather had been in the same business in the same shop. When motors ruined his work, he also turned to making furniture. Blacksmith for the I. P. Paper Co. for years was Joseph McGreen whose shop was behind the Howard Hardware store.
LOG DRIVES
Closely connected with the paper mills were the log drives which came down the Connecticut each spring from the great forests far up the river. While today paper can be made from hardwood, fifty years ago the log drives consisted mainly of pine and spruce, the same pumpkin pine which our ancestors cut and which the King marked for his own.
In August, 1915, the last big drives went over the dam, 65,000,000 feet of timber, mostly spruce. Logs had been going over the dam for sixty years when the first drive went through' in 1869. After the 1915 drive for a few years there was some four- foot wood which stopped above the falls but the days of the big" drives, of the tough and agile river men, were gone. The 1915 drive started on a Canadian branch of the Connecticut, the logs going down to Mt. Tom, Massachusetts, which took about a month Although contracts were made with the I. P. Co. for 1917, '18, and '19, all "four-foot stuff," the end had come.
The old drives were an interesting part of the town's history. The river men who invaded North Walpole saloons and Bellows Falls movies when they received their pay, remained in town for several weeks. They were also the woodsmen who had worked in the forests all winter, getting out the tree length logs on to the ice of river and pond which was thirty inches thick, to go down
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stream in the spring when it melted. Only the best men were chosen to take the logs down river, to ride them like acrobats, to follow them from the wild woods of Colebrook, N. H. to the mills at Mt. Tom. The rest found jobs to tide them over the summer until it was time to return to the woods again, to sleep twenty to a bunk in rude camps buried in six feet of snow. Some camps used 1,000 men and 550 horses where tractors are used today.
Previous to 1870, log rafts 12' x 60' were poled down the river as men learned that the great Connecticut was an easy and accessible route for the millions of feet of timber which fed the paper mills up and down its valley, each log stamped with the initials of the company which owned it. In 1914 the Boston Transcript told the story of this last drive. The forests to the north were becoming denuded but that year 60 to 80 million feet came down, the I. P. Co. alone owning 14,000,000 feet, their largest drive ever. So endless was the apparent supply on the virgin slopes that hungry lumber companies, with no thought of conservation, had cleaned off the land so completely that by 1915, their activities of necessity, came to an end. This despite the fact that in 1908, a few farsighted people realized that they were killing the goose with the golden eggs. However, the I. P. Co. which owned about 900,000 acres of woodland in the United States and 80,000 in Vermont, was even then operat- ing under improved forestry methods to insure a perpetual supply and announced its intention of replanting in conjunction with the New England Forestry Service, thus becoming one of the leaders in the conservation of National forests.
Each year, as the logs came through, there was considerable furor for usually the mills had to close down for two or three weeks. The story is told of the mill owner who grew irate at the necessity of closing. He said that he had an order of paper to finish. The boss of the river men was just as irate.
"I'll give you twelve hours to shut down," he shouted. "If you haven't quit by that time, I'll blow up your dam!" The mill owner stopped his wheels but not his curses. In 1915 the water was so high that no mills had to be closed which was unusual.
Toward the end of the drives, a veteran lumber dealer in Boston said that the logs were not what they used to be.
"Once we got 1,000 feet from every five trees," he said. "Now we're lucky to get 1,000 feet from 15 trees." The old patriarchs were gone from the forests. The I. P. Co. owned 1,000 acres near the White River at the end of operations, mostly "four-foot stuff."
During the 1915 drive, the men camped on the New Hamp- shire side of the river, a quarter of a mile below the Tucker Toll Bridge. It was a tough life and the men had to be the same way, rolling out of their bunks by four o'clock. eating breakfast and
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being on the river by five. They ate again at nine and three, the food being carried by wagon to those working at a distance from the wannigan (Wangan or Maryanne), the cooking shack which moved down the river on a raft. At five they gave over to the night crew which kept the logs going over the dam by electric lights.
The cookees or cook's helpers, carried the mid-day lunches to the nearby men in wooden buckets hung to a sort of sap yoke from their shoulders. On the Connecticut, which had the longest log drive in New England and possibly the United States, there was a wannigan with the biggest cook stove ever used on a drive, weighing 3,500 pounds. (Holy Old Mackinaw by Stewart Holbrook, p. 63.) It was good food and hearty which fed hearty men, huge kettles of beef and potatoes; hun -- dreds of biscuits; beanhole beans, big sugar cookies and hot gingerbread often baked outdoors in Dutch ovens before a hot fire. Vegetables were bought from nearby farmers.
The men, mostly French Canadians, arrived in camp near Bellows Falls and the other stops, about 200 at a time, in groups of fifty each with a boss. Sometimes they had to draw the logs, marooned by the water on a farmer's meadow, back to the water with the great Percheron horses which weighed 2,000 pounds apiece and ate a bushel of oats at a meal. (Charles Gleason in Brattleboro Reformer, Jan. 18, 1928). The horses, like the wannigans, came down the river on rafts and once a raft struck the ferry cable near the Upper Meadows, tipped over and drowned the horse.
The men worked in gangs, one gang pushing the logs along the piers, another working at the dam and another below the dam, from where the logs shot down the gorge at the Great Falls and on down the river. To those who recall the agility of the cat-footed men with the spiked shoes and pick poles, keeping their precarious balance on the rolling logs like tightrope walkers, it is an exciting memory. Many a small boy-or larger one- attempting to emulate the river acrobats or hunting for spruce gum on the great logs, has all but lost his life in the churning mass of logs and water.
Remains of the old piers may still be seen at low water, in the middle of the river, the great crypts of logs which were filled with rock, winters when the horses and sleds went out on the ice. Men came on ahead of the drive each spring to fashion the booms of forty-foot logs chained end to end, from bank to pier. The upper end of
the boom operated like a ,gate, swinging back and forth to let the logs in and out, sometimes 50 acres of dancing, fighting trees and water. The I. P. logs were boomed next to the Vermont shore about a mile above Bellows Falls, before the other drives came through, then herded across the river, a few at a time, to the opposite shore where they were
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heaved up the bank by a donkey engine on a raft, to be sawed up and trucked to the mill. The 1914 drive was a million feet larger than that of the preceding year although a new law in Massachusetts required all logs to be rafted before entering that state. D. J. MacDonald of New York was in charge of the river men that year and spent, as usual, five or six weeks here. Once the logs jammed a covered bridge at Brattleboro and had to be dynamited as often happened at Bellows Falls.
French Canadians still move into the northern woods in the winter but trucks carry the wood to the mills instead of the rivers today, except in Maine where some of the old methods are still used. The old wooden skid is also used but there are power- driven chain saws instead of the two-man rig. The cant hook and peavey are still used, the latter just as it was invented by Joseph Peavey, blacksmith, over in Maine, a hundred years ago. But hot showers and TV sets replace the primitive camps of fifty years ago. (Boston Sunday Globe, Nov. 7, 1954.) So long as forest conservation is practised, there will be logs going to mill, even if the old river route which once passed Bellows Falls is only history now.
SCYTHE SNATH FACTORY. For almost 70 years the Derby & Ball scythe snath factory, known as the oldest and largest such business in the world, was a a hustling sort of place, employing many men and turning out handles for that utili- tarian implement in an age when farmers still did much of their mowing by hand. The first shop was known as Frost, Derby & Co. in 1857, but in 1882 it had become Derby & Ball. Albert Derby was making snaths here in 1863 and joined forces with Franklin Ball who had also been making snaths in Spring- field, Vermont, for 29 years. The first shop was south of Adams grist mill but the high water took it out in April of 1869 and it was rebuilt safely above the water line on Hyde Street, probably Poplar, then. This was later burned but rebuilt on the same site.
Franklin Ball died in 1898 and his son George became a partner in the firm. George had a glass eye which he used to lay on the table when he was asleep, "to watch things for him," he said. He died in 1906 and the family of H. D. Ryder bought out the Derby interest and managed the business until 1923, Mrs. Ryder being Mr. Ball's sister. Their homes were side by side on Atkinson Street, now owned respectively by Joseph Dionne and Maurice Lawlor. (These were razed in 1958 to make room for the new A & P market.)
During the period of Mr. Ryder's management, a factory in Waterbury, Vermont, also making snaths, was merged with the Bellows Falls concern and it became known as the Derby, Ball & Edwards Co. At Mr. Ryder's death in 1923, his son Daniel Franklin, took over the business but it soon became evident that there was not enough business for two factories so
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the Bellows Falls mill was dismantled, closed and moved to Waterbury the next year. In 1923, William Mason, brother-in- law of Dan Ryder, joined him in a partnership which continued until 1947 when Dan sold out to him and became administrator of the Waterbury State Hospital.
It was during these later years that the firm saw a greater sale in their part of the country for skiis rather than snaths as winter sports moved in and hand mowing moved out. Machin- ery had taken most of the hand labor from farming and hand mowing, except for fence corners and lines, was headed for the limbo of forgotten things. Dan says that they still make scythe snaths as his grandfather did but that "the demand for anything which calls for hard work has declined sadly." Some people, of course, might consider skiing more than child's play! At one time this firm also made baseball bats. While skiis are now the important thing in the scythe snath shop, it is ironical that no Vermont tree is adaptable for this purpose and the wood for the "hickories" comes from the south. Mr. Mason, a Dartmouth graduate, is secretary-treasurer of the National Ski Manufactur- ing Association at Hanover, N. H. where they make ski poles to go with the boards as well as elaborate bindings. Among the men who worked at the shop when it was a local industry were William Kingston, Charles Fuller, John Lyons, Will Par- sons, Henry Hutchins, Harold Cady and his mother, Mrs. Carrie Cady, who was bookkeeper for a number of years.
Today the McArdle Manufacturing Company is located on part of this same site, a small but important, in fact, world famous business. In 1920 a suction box cover, called End-of- the Grain, was developed by Ward B. Carpenter and was used in every state which produced paper as well as Norway, Sweden, Finland, Mexico and Estonia. Today it also goes to Africa, Italy and South American countries. The devise is used to drain water from wood pulp, one of the first stages of the finished product and it looks to the layman like pieces of wood bored full of holes.
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