Writing on an Old Logging Camp
by Jeanne Siviski
Carving your initials into the timbers is a tradition at my friend’s hunting camp. Dates whittled into the weather-beaten logs of the bunk house and cook camp go back through the decades of the 20th century. Some that may be older have eroded into indecipherable glyphs.
The presence of a cook camp belies the camp’s origins as a logging operation. While the old roof made of four to five foot long cedar splints is long gone, replaced with modern asphalt shingles, the frame of notched spruce logs chinked with moss stands firm. Inside, original carpentry work, hand-hewn with an axe and froe, takes you a step back in time.
Two sturdy old log benches run the length of the dining table. A door separates what might have once been a “dingle,” a three to four foot space used in old logging camps for hanging meat or storing barrels of molasses and flour. A bear ripped that door off a few years back and scavenged through containers of flour and peanut butter. Its claw marks can be seen on the timbers by the door frame, initialing them, along with everyone else.
I don’t have an exact age for the camp, but it is not as old as northern Maine’s earliest logging camps, stark, windowless one room structures that had just a central fire for heat and cooking and a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. No separate cook camp back then. Men, as many a dozen, slept huddled together under a communal straw-stuffed quilt. That was around 1820; Maine had just become a state and much of the logging was largely organized into cooperatives. The initial phase of north woods logging took place after the revolutionary war and was carried out mainly by individuals and families.
After 1880, larger organizations and corporations took over the lumber industry, which reached its peak from 1890 to 1910. Cook camps were established, and camps were often judged by the quality of their food. In an article published in the Journal of Forest History, Joseph Conlin writes that, “only the ‘good’ camps in Maine seem to have been doing much more than beans, pork, and biscuits, even after 1890.” But portions were always large. Lumberjack breakfasts served today pale in comparison to what Conlin describes as “patently monstrous” consumption.
Cooks were called “boilers” or “sizzlers,” depending on their preferred cooking method. A bad cook was a “bean burner.” Beneath cooks were their underlings, or “cookies,” who lugged “bait cans,” or lunch buckets to the work site. Coffee was called “mud” and raisin bread was “fly bread.”
Camp cooks were often dictators at logging camps. The almost religious total silence demanded by some cooks during meals is hard to imagine now. When visiting my friends old cook camp, the quiet is only broken by the hush of swaying tall red pines that have grown back over the course of the last century - unless it’s hunting season, and then there’s a boisterous gang.
A Lewiston Journal Magazine article, published in 1940, states that the hundreds of old Maine logging camps between Greenville and Fort Kent are “…grim reminders of a once busy past.” Many of the old camps were already being converted for hunting and fishing, or summer homes, even back then. It’s hard to say how many are still standing. Some camps have been totally refurbished, the original timbers encased by newer walls, sealing their history.