Workingmen longed for snow a century ago like kids at Christmas, not so they could go snowmobiling, but so they could go to work.
“Snow badly needed,” a headline in the Bangor Daily Commercial said on Jan. 1, 1915. “Lumbermen and Farmers Hope For a Big Fall Soon.”
Lumbermen and farmers were “hoping and waiting for a rousing snow storm, one that will make hauling good and allow them to get their work done.” Many jobs hung in the balance.
One example was Bangor pulpwood dealer Neil E. Newman, who had about 20,000 cords of pulpwood cut “on various operations around Bangor, in Orrington, Burlington and other places, which are awaiting the coming of snow in order to be hauled to the cars and then taken to the mills.”
Meanwhile, in Brewer and Orrington a number of small pulpwood operators were “much hampered” by the lack of snow in their efforts to get their product to the Eastern Manufacturing Company. About 2,000 cords were expected by the Brewer mill.
“Snow is in urgent need, as the strain of hauling across exposed stretches of ground is one that tells on both horses and men,” the newspaper story explained.
Further north, lumbermen were also concerned about getting enough snow to haul their logs on big horse-drawn sleds to the sides of streams and rivers for the drives in the spring. There were already “eight or ten inches of snow, which is enough for yarding, but hardly sufficient for hauling.”
Men who hauled products around Bangor for a living were also having trouble without more snow. Heavy loads of coal, wood, grain and other goods made for tough going without a packed surface on the dirt roads of the era.
“It is almost too slippery for wheels and yet there are many bare places which require the hardest efforts on the part of the horses to get their loads over,” said the newspaper.
The city’s three ice companies were slow to start their cutting operations until they had more snow to haul the huge chunks of ice from the Penobscot River and the Kenduskeag Stream, said a story on Dec. 29, 1914, a few days after the river was closed to shipping traffic. Many men were waiting for jobs that would become available when the proper conditions occurred.
Meanwhile, there was plenty of snow and ice for both children and adults who just wanted to have some fun. Big bobsleds could be seen on moonlit nights racing down Cedar Street hill in Bangor. If conditions were right, they would fly right across Main Street and beyond.
Of course, this was back in the days when streets were still playgrounds and all one worried about on a winter night was a very occasional trolley car.
The river had been iced over since just before Christmas and scores of skaters could be seen down by the ferry slip, near where the Chamberlain Bridge sits today. Of course, they did not want to see snow, and that brings us to the second part of this column.
Within a couple of weeks enough snow had fallen to end the skating “opposite the ferry slip.” Presumably work in the woods and on city streets was moving at a faster clip by then, but skaters were not happy. “Scores of people” approached the Bangor Daily News in an effort to pressure the city into establishing a public skating rink.
“Skating is Bangor’s great midwinter sport,” said one anonymous observer in a story on Saturday, Jan. 16, “and yet hundreds — perhaps it would be no exaggeration to say thousands — are deprived of it because of the thin coating of snow.”
All it would take is a few “scrapers,” and, if necessary, some flooding by “one steamer, two firemen and a line of hose.” The expense would be “very trivial.”
“If anybody doubts the appeal of the sport here, he should have been on the river last Sunday afternoon. It was a really wonderful spectacle — a red-blooded panorama that did my heart good,” the observer continued. “There must have been 1,800 on the ice; and there were grinders to sharpen skates, candy and hot dog vendors — in fact all the trimmings of a winter carnival.”
Just two days later, on Monday, Jan. 18, the newspaper announced triumphantly that city workers had appeared after the paper came out Saturday morning and begun working on “a sort of huge municipal skating rink.
A crew scraped away the snow with the help of a city street sweeper. The plan called for banking the cleared area so the fire department could flood it when necessary. The city electrician had been instructed to install “two or three lights.”
“Never was a newspaper suggestion more quickly adopted,” crowed the reporter.
A week later, there was good news in the north woods as well. “SNOW AT LAST, LOGGERS REJOICE: Heavy Fall Up North Calls Back Discharged Woodsmen — A Freak Winter.” At least 15 inches had been recorded at Kineo and similar amounts at other places, reported the Bangor Daily News on Jan. 26.
Bangoreans had reason to rejoice as well. Many loggers had been sent back to the Queen City a week or so ago because there was so little work to do in the lumber camps. In Bangor they hung around the streets and the saloons getting into trouble. The new snow meant they would be recalled to help move the logs to the riverbanks for the drives to the mills when the ice and snow melted.
Local people in Bangor and surrounding towns would also benefit from the gradually accumulating snow. “Those who depend on snow for hauling cord wood, country produce and other heavy loads have waited many weeks for favorable conditions. Men who have been accustomed to getting jobs at shoveling snow have been disappointed,” said the newspaper.
One beneficiary of this snow drought earlier had been the trolley company, whose plows had been idle nearly all winter. In fact, it had been several years since the big rotary plow had “torn a way through heavy drifts” on the line to Old Town when men with shovels had failed to clear the track.
As winter progressed, the snow problem started up again, reported the Bangor Daily Commercial on Feb. 16. Neil E. Newman was still trying to get his pulpwood from Brewer Lake to the South Brewer station. A period of heavy rain slowed down his big Lombard log hauler, which depended, like horse-drawn wagons, on snow and ice to move about on winter’s deteriorated roads.
The next month, a variety of woods operations such as loggers, box board mills, portable sawmills and spoolwood mills were still making slow progress because of “untoward conditions” in northern Penobscot County.
One saw mill operator, Leroy J. Butterfield, who had cut 9 million feet of spruce and pine at Mattamiscontis Lake, vowed “to get it out even if there isn’t much snow there.” He was known in the woods business as a “hustler,” said the Commercial on March 8.
When we complain today about too much wintry weather, we should remember those hustlers a century ago who needed lots of snow and ice to put bread on the table.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, “Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era,” is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com