The Last Log Drive, circa 1929
At its peak in the nineteenth century about a third of local adult males were employed in forest production. The shanties were full of tall tales of the daring exploits of these (typically young) men and their incredible feats of strength. Some of the wildest stories came on the river drive, which was not an occupation for the faint of heart or anyone who was overly concerned with their own safety. John Langton, himself a prominent gentleman, called them “a light-hearted set of dare devils and the greatest rascals and thieves that ever a peaceful country was tormented with.”
The drive began as soon as the ice broke up—the spring freshet made it far easier to float logs downstream. The waters were frigid and many river drivers could not swim, yet they worked on the logs wearing caulk (pronounced “cork”) boots, with cleats that allowed them to jump from log to log, in what would later be dubbed “the Log Driver’s Waltz.” The men camped on shore as they made their way downstream, guiding the logs past the rapids and waterfalls along the way. Despite their best efforts, every once in a while, a log jam would form—creating a perilous situation. A volunteer cracker would climb out over the logs, pry the key log free, then jump like a squirrel from log to log, hoping to get back to shore before the shuddering mass made its way past the waterfall or rapid. Each cataract has its own cemetery of the log drivers who died in an accident, once marked with wooden crosses, now typically long forgotten.
By the late nineteenth century the virgin pine forests had been cutover. Hardwoods had many uses, but they were more difficult to float downstream than softwoods like pine. Once an area was connected via railways, it made little sense to float logs when they could be loaded on a train car. With the advent of trucks and better roads in the 1920s, the log drives that for many years had filled the Fenelon River became a thing of the past, even as wooden manufacturing remained a large proportion of the local economy. For how important they had once been, few people noticed when the last log drive quietly made its way down the Trent Watershed.
