At the completion of the summer excursion season in 1887, the Little Gem was booked for a trip to Toronto. On September 9, John West transported the vessel to Port Ryerse by team and wagon and launched her in Lake Erie. That same afternoon, despite a heavy sea, she made the 4.5-mile run to Port Dover in twenty minutes. The next day with seven passengers aboard, she left for the Welland Canal and the final destination of Toronto. However, the spring of 1888 saw the end of their excursion business when West & Peachey sold Little Gem to the local bank manager, Henry H. Groff, who housed the boat in Turkey Point.
Meanwhile business had begun to improve with an order from the Delhi Canning Factory in Delhi, Ontario, for the largest boiler ever manufactured in Norfolk County. It was installed in June 1888. In the fall of the same year, a contract to build a steam-powered pleasure yacht for use on Lake Erie was signed, but it would appear that the yacht was never built. She was to have had a beam of 9 feet and an overall length of 45 feet and be named the Queen of Simcoe. In December 1888, the firm built and installed a new railway turntable for the South Norfolk Railway in Port Rowan, followed by a second turntable, which they installed in Simcoe.
In October of that year, John West’s eldest son Simon John “Jack” left home to take a position with the Merchants Bank of Kitchener, and a promising young employee by the name of John Stalker joined the firm. This young man was destined to become the son-in-law of John West. Stalker married West’s eldest daughter Mary Jane in 1893.
4 The Lumber Trade in Norfolk Moves On
By 1880 the majority of the big stands of virgin pine had been harvested from the sand plains of Norfolk and the rest of the Long Point Country. The lumbermen and their families were forced to move on to often more remote areas in search of forested lands to harvest. Some turned to other parts of Ontario and Quebec where the pine-timber industry was being carried out on a much greater scale. Many others found opportunity in the forests of Michigan and beyond.
The Ottawa River watershed, which drained almost 60,000 square miles, was by far the largest area supporting white-pine timberlands in Ontario. Other areas where extensive stands of virgin pine were to be found included the Trent watershed, the Muskokas, areas around Georgian Bay, the Nipissing district, and the Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods districts. In Quebec, in addition to their share of the Ottawa River watershed, large stands of virgin pine were to be found in the St. Maurice and Saguenay watersheds, the Lake St. John district, the north shore of the St. Lawrence from the Saguenay River to the Bersimis, and on the south shore in the Gaspé district.
By the late 1880s, the more easily harvested timber along the main water routes had been removed. Lumbermen had to work in more remote, inland areas of rough and rocky terrain, where drainage was through myriad small lakes and connecting streams and creeks. The familiar spring river drives of thousands of logs at a time were a thing of the past. Removal of logs became much more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.
CADGE CRIB WARPING
Where pine logs had to be moved for miles, through a series of lakes and small streams, before reaching the river that would carry them to the mill, the lumbermen resorted to a method called warping. It was first necessary to build a cadge crib or warping crib.
This crib was simply a raft of preferably dry, red-pine logs that were light and floated high in the water. The raft or crib, usually 40 to 50 feet square, was constructed in late winter on the shore of the lake where the logs were to be moved. A wooden capstan was next anchored to the crib and supplied with 300 to 600 feet of 2-inch manila rope. To one end was attached a heavy warping anchor.
Other floating cribs were also built to accommodate a bunkhouse for the men doing the warping, and a cookhouse where the cook on the drive could store supplies, cook, and feed the men. When the ice went out of the lake, the logs to be moved to the sawmill were assembled in a bag boom, the name applied to a mass of loose logs enclosed in a loop, or “bag,” of logs chained end to end, for the purpose of towing. The ends were then brought together to enclose the remaining loose logs to be moved, and the resultant boom of logs was attached to the warping crib by a cable or chain.
These three men strain to operate the capstan — or headworks — on a cadge crib to move a boom of logs to a waiting sawmill. Photo circa 1891.
Courtesy of the Clarence F. Coons Collection.
A small rowboat was required to begin moving the boom. The warping anchor would be rowed out to the full 300-foot length of the manila rope to which the anchor was attached. The anchor was then dropped and the men on the crib began pushing on the bars of the capstan. As they travelled round and round the capstan, or headworks as it was called, the crib and boom were slowly drawn to the warping anchor, imbedded in the lake bottom. As the rope came aboard the crib and was coiled down, the boom was moved slowly down the lake. This procedure was repeated, as many times as required, to move the boom of logs to the opposite end of the lake being traversed.
The crew of a cadge crib pose for the photographer before embarking on the crib for a long day of hard work.
Courtesy of Archives of Ontario, #S 16199.
George S. Thompson, a logging superintendent for several years in the Trent watershed, provided a first-hand account of what warping a log boom was really like:
Often I have seen a crew of forty or fifty men warping, as it is called, for days at a time, sometimes for thirty or forty consecutive hours at a stretch. This ceaseless pushing on the hand bars of a capstan, it is worse than a treadmill in a jail, the constant going round for so long a time often made men sick. To hold or coil “slacks” as the rope came in was another job even worse, for one’s hands most of the time, if not freezing, would be terribly sore.1
When horses were used for warping, the capstan was modified and the rope lengthened to about 600 feet. This also meant that stabling for the horses had to be provided on the crib. Fewer men, from sixteen to eighteen rather than thirty or more, were needed when horses were used. Horse capstans and warping anchors were manufactured commercially by the William K. Hamilton Manufacturing Company Limited in Peterborough, Ontario.
This method of moving logs was both slow and expensive and required a workforce of many men. A further hazard was the wind, which, if in the wrong direction, could either blow the crib and boom ashore or in the opposite direction. The warping crib could not be moved from one lake to the next unless connected by a stream large enough to float the crib and its boom of logs. The alternative was to have several warping cribs to move the logs through a series of lakes. In smaller operations the cribs were disassembled and moved to the next lake, where they were reassembled.
Once the logs had been moved through a series of lakes, rivers, rapids, and waterfalls, a crew of agile men were required to break up log jams and “sweep” shorelines for escaped logs. This called for a light, rugged, shallow-draught rowing boat. But until the 1850s no satisfactory boat could be found to perform the job to everyone’s satisfaction. It is the prominent timber baron of the Ottawa area, J.R. Booth, who is credited with finding the man who designed and built the pointer boat, a boat well adapted to this very specific job.
A horse capstan, operating on the Pickerel River, is shown “at rest” as the horse and men take a breather. The man on the left coils down the manila rope as it comes off the capstan. The outboard end is attached to the anchor set ahead of the crib.
Courtesy