A jam is caused by obstacles in the river catching some of the sticks, which in their turn catch others coming down; and so the mass increases until a solid dam is formed, which entirely stops up the river, and prevents the further passage of any logs. These jams are most frequently formed at the top of some fall; and it is often a service that requires much skill and boldness, and is attended with much danger, to break them up. The persons who undertake it must go on the mass of logs, work some out with their pick poles, cut some to pieces, attach ropes to others to be hauled out by the hands on shore, and they must be on the alert to watch the moment of the starting of the timber, and exercise all their activity to get clear of it before they are carried off in its tumultuous rush. Some weeks, more or less, according to the distance, spent in this way, bring the timber to the neighborhood of the saw-mills. A short distance from Oldtown, on the Penobscot, there is a boom established, extending across the river, for the purpose of stopping all the logs that come down. It is made by a floating chain of logs, connected by iron links, and supported at suitable distances by solid piers, built in the river; without this it would be impossible to stop a large part of the logs, and they would be carried on the freshet down the river, and out to sea. The boom is owned by an individual, who derives a large profit from the boomage, which is thirty-five cents per thousand on all logs coming into it. The boom cost the present owner about $40,000. He has offered it for sale for $45,000. It is said the net income from it some years is $15,000. Here all the logs that come down the Penobscot are collected in one immense mass, covering many acres, where is intermingled the property of all the owners of timber lands in all the broad region that is watered by the Penobscot and its branches, from the east line of Canada, above Moosehead Lake, on the one side, to the west line of New Brunswick on the other. Here the timber remains till the logs can be sorted out for each owner, rafted together, and floated to the mills or other places below. Rafting is the connecting the logs together by cordage, which is secured by pins driven into each log, forming them into bands, like the ranks of a regiment. This operation is performed by the owner of the boom. The ownership of the timber is as certained by the marks which have been chopped into each log before it left the woods, each owner having a mark, or combination of marks, of his own. When the boom is full, only the logs lowest down can be got at; and the proprietors of other logs must wait weeks, sometimes months, before they can get them out, to their great inconvenience and damage. After the logs are rafted and out of the boom, a great part of them are lodged for convenience in a place called Pen Cove, which is a large and secure basin in the river, about two miles below the boom. From this cove they can be taken out as they are wanted for the mills below. While in the boom and at other places on the river, they are liable to great loss from plunderers. The owners or drivers of logs will frequently smuggle all that come in their way, without regard to marks. The owners or conductors of some of the mills on the river are said to be not above encouraging and practising this species of piracy. Indeed, timber in all its stages seems to be a fair object for plunderers, from the petty pilferer who steals into the woods, fells a tree, cuts it into shingles, and carries it out on his back, to the comparatively rich owner of thousands of dollars. When the logs have been sawn at the mills, there is another rafting of the boards, which are floated down the river to Bangor, to be embarked on board the coasters for Boston. In this process they are subject to much injury: first, by the mode of catching them as they come from the mill sluices, the rafters making use of a picaroon, or pole, with a spike in the end of it, which is repeatedly and unmercifully driven into the boards, taking out, perhaps, a piece at each time; secondly, by the holes made by the pins driven into the boards in rafting; and, thirdly, by the rocks, and rapids, and shallows in the river, breaking the rafts to pieces and splitting up the boards as they descend. These inconveniences will be partly remedied by the railroad now in operation, unless other inconveniences in the use of it should be found to overbalance them. The kinds of timber brought down our rivers are pine, spruce, hemlock, ash, birch, maple, cedar, and hackmatack. Far the greater part of it is pine. The lumberers make about six kinds of pine, though they do not agree exactly in the classification, or in the use of some of the names. The most common division is into pumpkin-pine, timber pine, sapling, bull-sapling, Norway, and yel-berers that are river-drivers. A great part low, or pitch-pine. The pumpkin-pine stands of the lumberers are farmers, who must be pre-eminent in the estimation of the lumber- on their farms at the season of driving, and, ers, because it is the largest tree, and makes therefore, cannot undertake any thing but fine, large, clear boards. They are soft, and of a yellowish cast. The timber-pine and saplings are the most common. The former is generally preferred, as being larger and more likely to be sound; yet the saplings are said to make the harder and more durable boards. The common sapling grows in low lands, generally very thick, but much of it is apt to be rotten. The bullsapling is larger and sounder, grows on high land, and is mixed with hard wood. The Norway pine is a much harder kind of timber than the others. It is seldom sawn into boards, though it makes excellent floorboards; but it is generally hewn into square timber. the cutting and hauling. They are paid for the number of thousand feet they deposit at the landing-places; and the logs being surveyed, or scaled, as they are hauled, their object is to get as many thousand feet as possible on the landing-places; while the river-drivers may be very careless about getting them all down, and the owner may never receive the whole quantity he has paid for cutting and hauling. In operating in this mode, the owner usually furnishes the supplies, provisions, etc., and the lumberer procures the teams and hires the men. The owner, commonly, does not bind himself to pay before the logs go to market, and he frequently makes a contract for his supplies on the same condition, in which case he has to pay from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent. more for his goods than he would dealing on cash or common credit. Sometimes, when there is no freshet, the logs do not go down until the second year; and then the trader and lumberer both suffer for want of their pay. I will conclude with some remarks upon the different modes of operating made use of by owners of timber. There are three. One is for the owner to hire his men by the month, procure teams, and furnish them with equipments and supplies. A second is to agree with some one or more individuals to cut and haul the timber, or cut, haul, and run it, at a certain price per thousand feet. The third way is to sell the stumpage outright that is, to sell the timber standing. The first mode is seldom adopted, unless the owner of the timber is likewise a lumberer, and intends to superintend the business himself. The second mode is very common. It is considered the most saving to the owners, because the lumberer has no inducement to select the best timber, and leave all that is not of the first quality; to cut down trees and take, and leave others to rot that are not quite so good, but may be worth hauling. Its inconveniences are, that, as the object of the lumberer is to get as large a quantity as possible, he will take trees that are not worth so much as the cost of getting them to market, and which, besides being of little value themselves, render the whole lot less saleable by the bad appearance they give it. The owner, too, is subject to all the losses that may happen in running the logs down the river. Very frequently he is obliged to make a contract to have the But, after all, there is almost always found timber cut and hauled to the landing-places, to be a considerable difference between timand another to have it run down; for the ber cut by the thousand and that which river-drivers are a distinct class from the is cut on stumpage. Each mode has its troublumberers. Most of them, indeed, are lum-les; but I think that owners at a distance berers; yet it is but a small part of the lum- will manage their concerns with least vexa The third mode is by far the simplest and easiest for the owner. He avoids all trouble of furnishing supplies, of watching the timber on the river, and of looking out for a market. But he must have a man of some capital to deal with, as he furnishes his own teams and supplies, and pays the men, receiving very heavy advances. The purchaser of it has no interest to cut the timber savingly, and he sometimes makes dreadful havoc among the trees, leaving a great deal of valuable stuff on the ground to rot. And if he selects only the best trees in a berth, much of the timber left standing may be lost, because no one will afterward want to go into that berth from which all the best trees have been culled. It is common now to employ a man to pass the winter in the camps, living alternately at one or another, for the purpose of scaling the logs, keeping a correct account of them, and seeing that the timber is cut according to the contract. tion by selling the stumpage, provided that with a practised eye here and there, until he they have honest men to deal with. It might be mentioned in connection with the above interesting statement, that the primary object in the settlement of Maine was to engage in the lumber business. Agriculture was originally secondary to that business, and grew up of necessity, in connection with it. The same may be said of some parts of New Hampshire. Mason and Gorges procured their grant, embracing a large tract above Portsmouth, Dover, etc., for the purposes of lumbering and the manufacture of potash. It was common in Maine for a lumberman to work at farming in summer, and cut and haul lumber in the winter. A brief description of lumbering at Green Bay, in the northern part of Wisconsin, will be interesting in this connection. to see. discovers one log which is the key to the In the absence of accurate statistics, which ought to have been furnished by the last census, it is not possible to give a detailed statement of the full extent of the lumber business of the country; and hence, any information on the subject must necessarily come far short of giving an adequate idea of its vastness, and of the progress which the "A logging camp in the winter," says a last few years have witnessed in its develop resident of Green Bay, "is an exhilarating ment. But we know that the export of scene. The great trees falling here and lumber from the United States has risen there, with a thundering sound; the fine, from $1,822,077 in 1821 to five millions in strong teams moving off to the river with 1853; we know that, during the four years their loads, and hurrying back with empty from 1850 to 1853 inclusive, the value of sleds; the songs and shouts of the jolly, red- lumber exported was nearly twenty millions shirted lumbermen; the majestic forest sce- of dollars; we know that the amount of nery, standing out so handsomely in the lumber received at Chicago alone in one clear air of northern winter, make up a pan-year (1857) was no less than 459,639,198 orama that is worth going a day's journey feet, besides upward of eighty millions of Finally, the snow fades out before laths. Chicago, indeed, as a lumber market, the spring sun. It goes first from the log- stands pre-eminent, and its rise and progress ging road, because there it has been most as such is little less remarkable than its worn; and then the lumbermen make ready for the running,' and wait impatiently for the breaking up of the stream and the coming of the freshet. If they are a long way up the stream, this is a matter of great anxiety, for, perhaps, the rise will not be sufficient, and their logs will lie over till another year. One firm on the Oconto got logs as high up as ninety miles from the mouth. If the water is high, the logs come down by thousands upon thousands, rushing, clogging up, breaking away again, piling upon each other, and requiring the constant efforts of the drivers to keep them on the go. Sometimes, when an obstruction occurs, a few logs form a 'jam,' and those coming after them, with terrific force, are piled up in rude masses, till one not familiar with it would think the whole enterprise hopelessly ended, for there seems no possibility of ever extricating the mass, perhaps, of a thousand logs. But a single man, with an iron-shod handspike, goes upon the jam carefully, looking] 1857, 459,639,198 131,832,250 80,130,000 The ves growth as a grain market. The banks of Here are some of the receipts of lumber in that city: 1847, Lath. Lumber.-Feet. Shingles. 1848, 60,009,250 20,000,000 10,250,109 1849, 73,259,553 39,057,750 19 281,733 1850, 100,364,779 55,423,750 19,809,700 1851, 125,056,437 60,338,250 27,583,475 This, it must be borne in mind, is the business, in this particular trade, of only one city. Many other cities and large towns might be named, which, for extent of operations, would compare favorably with it. The city of Boston receives from the southern states lumber to the value of a million of dollars a year, to say nothing of the immense quantities which she receives, also, from the north and east, and from Nova Scotia. In what has been said above, reference has been had exclusively to the procuring of lumber for the purposes of building. The vast amount required for fuel has not been considered, but if that could be taken into account it would form an item of amazing importance, not only as ministering to the comfort of millions of people, but in a commercial and business point of view. There was a time, and that quite recently, when serious apprehensions were felt on account of the rapid disappearance of the woodlands of New England and the older northern states, lest they should, at no distant day, fail altogether to furnish a sufficient supply. The multiplication of railroads, and their great consumption of wood, had raised the prices to such an extent that the farmer could not wait for his young woodlands to grow, and thousands of acres were every year cut off to meet this demand. The introduction of coal into general use in the cities and large towns, and the resort to that by many of the leading lines of railway, has now relieved us from any cause for alarm, and the forests, even of Massachusetts, are now, it is believed, on the increase. To this is to be added an increasing taste for the cultivation of forest trees, which in time will make a very perceptible improvement in the natural scenery of the country. PROGRESS OF AGRICULTURAL LITERATURE. mand for information incident to the general spirit of inquiry which the association of effort produced in the public mind, and especially since it has, for the most part, grown up within the last twenty years, or long subsequent to the formation of many of the agricultural societies. If we except the "Essays on Field Husbandry," by the Rev. Jared Eliot, of Connecticut, prepared as early as the middle of the last century, and the valuable papers submitted to the Massachusetts, the New York, and the Pennsylvania Agricultural Societies, and published by them about the beginning of the present century, we cannot be said to have had any agricultural literature, till within the memory of many men still living. None, in fact, till within the last twenty or thirty years. The "Essays on Field Husbandry," considering the time when they were written, were certainly a remarkable contribution to the agricultural literature of the country, filled with the most judicious advice, and worthy of republication, both as a part of the history of our agriculture and for their own intrinsic merits. But, as already remarked on a former page, the book was far in advance of the farming community of that time, and it is not probable that it had many readers. The papers published by the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture, commenced as early as 1796, were among the most valuable that have ever appeared in this country. They are embraced in a series of ten octavo volumes, called the " Agricultural Repository," and extend over a period of thirty years, discussing many questions which agricultural chemistry and other kindred sciences have since definitively settled and explained, but containing much useful information on a great variety of subjects connected with practical agriculture. The agricultural library connected with my office is one of the most valuable and extensive in the country, but I regard the "Agricultural Repository" as among the most valuable series in it. The improvement and increase of the agricultural literature of the country might very properly have been treated of in the early part of this chapter, as among the The farming community gradually "took means or the causes of the progress which to reading." The American Farmer was has been made in the development of our commenced in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1819, agricultural wealth, to which it has contrib- and is believed to have been the first strictly uted nearly as much, perhaps, as the agri- agricultural periodical started in the councultural societies themselves. I have, how- try. It was sold in 1829 for twenty thouever, preferred to reserve it for this position, sand dollars, which, at that time, was a very for the reason that it may with equal pro- large price for an agricultural paper. It has priety be said to have grown out of a de- been regularly published up to this time, and is still in a flourishing condition, with a | years, and have received a generous patrongood circulation. The Agricultural Intelligencer was established in Boston in 1820, but for some reason or other, probably for want of sufficient support, was discontinued, and the New England Farmer was begun in 1822 by Thomas G. Fessenden. This journal, an eight page quarto, was continued with a varying fortune till 1846, when it died, but another of the same name, an octavo monthly and folio weekly, sprang up, and is still in the full tide of success. The New York Farmer was established soon after the New England Farmer, and was continued for several years by Mr. Samuel Fleet, then sold to Mr. D. K. Miner, who engaged the services of Mr. Henry Colman as editor, till the journal died, and is no more. In 1831, Mr. Luther Tucker, one of the oldest agricultural editors of the country, established the Genesee Farmer, at Rochester, N. Y. At the end of the first year it had but six hundred subscribers. But Mr. Tucker persevered, until, in 1839, the subscription reached 19,000. age from the farming community, among which ought to be mentioned the Rural New Yorker, with a very wide circulation; the Country Gentleman, published in connection with the Cultivator, at Albany; the Ohio Farmer, of very wide influence and large circulation; the Michigan Farmer, at Detroit; the Valley Farmer, at St. Louis; the Wisconsin Farmer, at Madison; the North-Western Farmer, at Dubuque; the Southern Planter, at Richmond; the California Farmer, at Sacramento; the Homestead, at Hartford, Connecticut-all exceedingly valuable and well conducted papers; the Working Farmer, in New York city, and many others with which I am less familiar. There are in the northern and western states more than twenty-five journals, most of which are weekly, devoted almost exclusively to agriculture and horticulture, and the aggregate circulation of these is not less than 250,000 copies. There are also in the southern states, some six or eight similar publications devoted to agriculture, whose In the meantime, Judge Buel had estab- aggregate circulation is not less than thirtylished the Cultivator, at Albany, in 1833, and five thousand copies. These facts are exat his death, in 1839, Mr. Tucker purchased ceedingly important with reference to the that journal of his heirs, and removed to present condition of our agriculture, since Albany, uniting the Genesee Farmer and they indicate a wide-spread spirit of inquiry the Cultivator which is still in a very and intelligence among farmers, which must flourishing condition, having exerted a long- necessarily have an important influence on continued and wide-spread influence. The the future development of this great inplace made vacant by the removal of the Genesee Farmer from Rochester was soon filled by the New Genesee Farmer, soon after which the first word of the title was dropped, and as the Genesee Farmer it is still published, and has a wide circulation. The American Agriculturist, established about the year 1842, was continued with some success for some years, till its subscription list became reduced to a few hundreds, when it passed into new hands, felt the infusion of younger blood, and in less than five years the subscription has risen to upward of fifty thousand. The Farmers' Cabinet was published some years in New York city, under the editorship of J. S. Skinner, who first established the American Farmer, at Baltimore. Mr. Skinner, in 1848, started the Plough, Loom, and Anvil, which was continued till quite recently. The Maine Farmer was established about the year 1832, and has exerted a good influence. terest. Besides the large number and wide circulation of the journals devoted to agriculture, there is a good demand for agricultural books, and many of the standard works published in Europe have been republished in this country, including Stephens' "Book of the Farm," Thaer's " Principles of Agriculture," Johnston's " Agricultural Chemistry," and many other European works of established reputation. These foreign works were soon followed by American treatises on landscape gardening, fruits, animals, draining, dairy farming, and, in fact, on subjects covering the whole ground of farm economy, more or less perfectly. Many of these treatises and republications have had a wide circulation. The "Modern Horse Doctor" has sold to the extent of more than twenty thousand copies, "Youatt and Martin on Cattle" over ten thousand, "Youatt on the Horse" over twenty-five thousand, and many others in a similar pro Many other agricultural journals have been started within the last five or ten portion. |