>> This site along the Connecticut River in Massachusetts is known as the Narrows.

The river here is constricted.

It passes through an underwater gorge 100ft deep.

If you were to visit this site a century ago in July and August, you wouldn't see the Connecticut River.

You would see a river of logs.

Hundreds of thousands of logs as far as the eye could see.

You could walk from one side of the river to the other side of the river and never touch water.

This was one of the principal holding areas of the Connecticut River.

Log drives.

The longest log drives in America.

At this site Here you can still see evidence of the old log drive era if you know where to look.

The Rivermen had a boom across the river here.

Now a boom is constructed from a series of logs that are chained end to end, and then the two ends of the boom are chained to the opposite sides of the bank.

What this boom acts is a way of trapping and collecting the logs to keep them from going downstream.

We can find evidence of this boom still on the banks.

There's enormous clamps that are still set in the bedrock here, where the boom would have been attached.

But it turns out this particular site has been preserved because it's most of it's underwater.

The downstream Turners Falls dam raised the water level here about 16ft.

So most of this log drive site is underwater as many of the sites are along the Connecticut River.

So to really to explore this site, you have to go underwater.

And when you go into water, you really come in for some nice surprises.

In fact, on both sides of the river we can find iron clamp after iron clamp drilled into the bedrock where these booms would have been attached.

In fact, one of these clamps still has a boom chain on it.

The boom chain is attached to the clamp and disappears into the depths of the gorge.

We also found a clamp that someone lost as these clamps were being put in the river.

Men had boats here.

Someone dropped the clamp and that clamp is still down there.

Now, as we go deeper into this area, we find other evidence because, as I said, these booms were constructed by chaining logs end to end.

Well, you can imagine someone's chaining these logs end to end and you drop a chain.

And when you drop a chain in this gorge, that's the end of the chain.

So what we find is little piles of rusty chain scattered all through the bottom here.

Now, when you're diving, you can barely recognize it.

It looks like a little rusty mass.

But as you look close, you can see links.

When you feel it, it doesn't feel like stone.

It feels like iron.

So you have these rusty boom chains just scattered all over the bottom.

Now, as the Rivermen work this boom, what they use, they use long poles.

They were called pike poles.

There were 20ft long, and they had an iron spike at the end.

And they would push these logs past the boom on the way downstream.

So you can imagine a river man really pushing hard on one of these pike poles, and the end snaps off.

And so what we find at the bottom here as well are the points of pike poles.

The actual iron points that had snapped off as someone a century ago was pushing against the log to send it downstream.

So between 1870 and 1915, over 9 million spruce logs past this point.

Every year, over 200,000 logs pass this particular spot.

So why do the log drives happen?

Why were they so profitable?

Well, to answer this question, we must consider what was happening in New England in the latter part of the 1800s.

New England's Industrial Revolution was not based upon coal and steam power.

It was based upon water power.

Many of the streams and rivers in New England we see dams popping up like mushrooms.

New industrial cities were planned and built.

But this industrial building boom was occurring in an environment that was essentially devoid of merchantable timber.

New England at that time was a land of fields and pastures, not forests as it is today.

This then becomes the reason for the log drive's 250 miles upstream in New Hampshire and Vermont.

There were 700mi of virgin red spruce Bruce.

And it's this red spruce that was ultimately caught and felled and brought down to Connecticut that built our cities.

Believe it or not, I'm walking in the headwaters of the Connecticut River.

This is where the log drive story really begins.

The Connecticut River has its origins in this lake and three others upstream.

These lakes are imaginatively called the first Connecticut Lake, the second Connecticut Lake, the third Connecticut Lake, and the fourth Connecticut Lake.

It's as if they couldn't think of a name, so they just named them sequentially going north.

The waters that drain off this landscape and the streams and brooks enter these lakes.

And then these are the waters that become the headwaters of the Connecticut River.

Now, if we were going to go back in time back in the late 1800s and look around us, it would be in the middle of a virgin spruce forest, a forest of red spruce.

These are virgin trees going back that would be hundreds of years old.

These trees would be cut to build the cities and towns of Massachusetts.

This was an isolated wilderness, a wilderness that was sort of in the back of beyond, full of wealth.

And the wealth was, of course, the spruce trees.

The forest has regrown over much of the land that was clear cut a century ago.

So finding the sites of the old logging camps is difficult, if not impossible.

>> It's right in here somewhere.

Right there.

You see it?

Stay.

Garage.

Just stop there.

>> But with the help of historians, you can get some idea of how it was to live and work in the North Woods in the late 1800s.

>> The log camps.

Of course.

That was an interesting way of life.

It's all gone now.

The men would go in the fall.

They'd stay there till spring break up.

Usually they'd have 500 men.

They'd have, oh, 2 to 300 horses, all housed in maybe 6 or 8 camps scattered around some of those vast properties.

When we go back into the mid 1800s, they were pretty crude.

The men would have a long bunk and they'd sleep on this same bunk just stretched out.

They tell stories about how they'd just get a big wool blanket or mat and throw it over all of the men they sleep under that.

Later years.

They began to at least have individual bunks, but you'll see pictures of them with the wet, dirty clothes hanging up in the middle and the stove going, and the seats along the edge of the bunks, and it must have been quite an odor in there.

They usually would have one building for the bunkhouse and another one for the cook, and then a separate one for the horses.

Believe me, the horses got more care than the men sometimes because they couldn't go without the horses.

The cook, of course, was the most important man.

If they didn't feed them well, they'd pack up their stuff, and off down the road they'd head.

So good.

Cooks were legendary in the North Woods.

There was one up there.

His name was Joe Boulet.

They called him Joe Bouley, and he was reputed to be the dirtiest cook in the North Woods.

One of his little tricks was his mouse trap was set up over the barrel of molasses, so that when the mouse or the rat walked out onto this little board to get the bait, it would tip, and down he'd go into the molasses.

And then the next morning, Joe Boulet would just pick the critter out of the molasses and throw them away.

And then, of course, use the molasses for the next meal.

But that was one of his typical ways that that earned him the title The Dirtiest Cook in the North Woods.

I did recall hearing some of the old timers tell about occasionally seeing a woman cook, and they said when it was a woman, she really had to hold her own.

That is, she had to be tough.

She had to rule the roost and couldn't take any guff from the men.

>> At daybreak, the cook.

>> Bellowed, roll out!

Out we rolled, getting into our stiff and frozen boots and going out for grub.

Grub was placed on boards in the open.

You took your tin and dived into the kettle and fished out just the amount you desired.

The menu was always the same.

Baked beans.

Sourdough biscuits.

Spuds, salted meat.

Doughnuts and tea.

Always black and strong enough to float a peavey.

But boy, those beans.

You ain't tasted nothing yet if you haven't had beans cooked in a bean hole.

>> Vico was not usually allowed in camps except the cook.

He had his extracts, which had.

>> A lot of alcohol.

>> Had a lot of alcohol in it, and it was very hard to keep keep some of these camp kitchens supplied with extract of all sorts.

>> Because the guys were drinking the stuff like it was booze.

>> There were fistfights and kicks and things like that.

It was sent down the road and if they acted up.

>> Here we are at the Northern Forest Heritage Park in Berlin, New Hampshire.

And this sign, I think, says it all.

When you wonder who are the log drivers?

Who drove the logs?

Who cut the wood?

This sign tells us that, uh, they came from a lot of different places.

Look at all the languages.

Don't spit on the floor.

And a lot of different ways to say it.

Time really has a way of just healing the Northwoods.

You can hardly know any humans ever did anything here.

Yet.

This was the center of activity on the second Connecticut lake for the Connecticut River log drives.

Sometimes finding things, you know, log drive days is easier said than done.

Yep.

We're at the remains or ruins of Camp Idlewild, the headquarters of the Connecticut Valley Lumber Company along the second Connecticut Lake.

But all that's left now are those past times.

Are these foundations, foundations, presumably, of one of the barns that serviced the horses and held the supplies that were then used in the forests around the lake?

We can see a bit of the foundations here.

It's a drywall foundation.

It sort of disappears underneath all this stuff.

But if you tear away all the stuff, you can start to see it.

Fortunately, there's no poison ivy around here in front of the camp.

Idlewild.

You have the lake shore, and there was a dock down here on the lake.

This CVL headquarters serviced this part of the logging operations.

Now, we were diving in front of the lake where the old dock would have been.

And when you dive beneath the waters, what you find is that there's just a lot of trash.

The way people dispose of their trash.

Seems they just dumped it into the lake.

Rusty cans, old milk pitchers and a lot of booze bottles.

It turns out a lot of whiskey bottles are down here.

And these whiskey bottles, by their make date to the turn of the century.

Now, I understand what was happening with this particular camp.

This camp was both used as a headquarters building for the Connecticut Valley Lumber Company, but also was used as a sporting club, a sporting club for a lot of the big shots of the CVL.

But when they came out here for sport, I suspect just like today, they not only went fishing and hunting, they did a little tippling.

Picture someone sitting along the side of the lake here, having had a nice dinner up here, and has whiskey bottles and a glass, and finishes off the whiskey bottle.

And where's the whiskey bottle?

Go right into the lake and they're all still down there.

So let's imagine ourselves back in 1890, in the winter.

The lakes would be frozen.

Landscape covered in snow.

But there wouldn't be silence.

What you'd be hearing is the is the chopping of axes, the sawing of trees, the felling of trees as the crowds broke through the forest.

Camps were set up throughout this virgin forest, and from these camps crews of loggers felled the forest.

So all winter long, with temperatures dropping to 40 below zero, crews of men worked in these forests, taking everything of any size.

>> The basic tools was an axe and a saw and a horse, and it was that way for 150 years.

They would begin to cut the trees in the fall, skid them to a place where they could load them on the sleds.

They'd build sled roads.

>> Teams of horses pull the trees down the hillsides, but they didn't pull them to the lakes.

They didn't.

They pulled them to the edges of brooks, to the edges of streams.

>> There wasn't much for tractors in the woods.

However, there was one.

It was known as a Lombard, with crawler tracks on the back and runners on the front that was be steered either by a horse hooked on the front to pull it one way or the other, or a man sitting there with a steering wheel.

>> If we look at early pictures of these environments, the edges of these brooks and the edges of streams are just massive piles of spruce logs.

These massive piles of spruce logs are waiting for spring.

>> Once the sled roads in the woods broke up, that was it till spring breakup.

The woods crew then was looking for some spring employment on the log drive, and they might have to hang around until the log drives began, which would not be until the ice went out, obviously, because up in the Connecticut Lake area, it probably would be end of April before the ice let out.

And so until then, there wasn't much the loggers can do.

There was a period of time when the saloons were pretty full and the fights were pretty fierce.

During their time off in between the logging season and the driving season, they had some rip snorters.

>> The lumbermen are fast leaving the woods and our streets are again thronged with men.

The usual scenes of drunkenness and brawling are an everyday occurrence.

>> Well, I can assure you that the locals locked up their daughters for a while.

The porter was standing up on the balcony of the inn in the village of Canaan, Vermont, and he said he looked out.

He could see 50 fights going on down below him with 100 men down there.

I can imagine that things were getting pretty raw.

>> Because this landscape is totally covered in snow.

There's a lot of water locked up in the landscape.

This snow melt is what's going to carry the logs Ultimately downstream to the sawmills in Massachusetts.

There's lots of streams and brooks that are entering these Connecticut lakes.

These streams and brooks were manipulated.

The vast hydraulic engineering program was carried out here to move the wood downstream.

It was a rule of thumb.

Engineering program was based on putting dams on all of these small streams and brooks.

For me, this is just what's unbelievable and really interesting about the log drive story, because here you are in the middle of a wilderness at least.

So you think it's a wilderness, but it's really not.

This is an entirely man made environment, a man made environment that has its genesis back from the days of the log drives.

Whereas this lake was once a bog, the dam downstream was constructed to convert this bog into a lake, primarily to hold water to provide the motive force, the motive power to carry the logs that were cut along the sides of this bog downstream into the Connecticut River.

Practically every stream up in this part of the country has had a dam across it to hold up a head of water to drive logs toward the Connecticut.

What's really fascinates me is we can still find bits and pieces of this thing still here after over a hundred years.

Here's a spike sticking out of this log.

These are all parts of the dam.

They were all spiked together, carrying across here to hold back the water of this little brook, to make a lake which is up there.

And that lake.

Then the water behind that lake, as the snow melted, would be manipulated to let out impulses to carry the logs down this small stream.

These pulses of logs that are let out have to be regulated so as they converge on, on the larger and larger streams that they converge on the Connecticut River, on the lakes.

They don't just all jam together.

This stuff has to be set out in some sort of regulated fashion.

And how they did this is really a bit of a mystery, at least to me.

This is really a well thought out, well coordinated piece of hydraulic engineering.

And if you look at this stream today and you say, well, you're going to you're going to drive hundreds of 40 foot spruce logs down this stream just to even to conceive it.

You think you're out of your mind.

Yet it was done.

Once they reach these big lakes, how do the log drivers get them across the lakes?

They made enormous booms, enormous rafts of these logs.

And then they towed them across.

And the early days, they towed them across in a very strange way.

They had these giant anchors that looked like steamboat anchors.

And they would take a small boat, and they'd take the anchor out a certain distance into the lake and let it go, come back to the boom and winch the boom to where the anchor was with big capstans with human power.

So slowly but surely these these masses of logs would be moved across these lakes.

This is an authentic Connecticut River log drive anchor.

This was found in the first Connecticut lake.

These anchors are found throughout the Connecticut River.

Many of them are still on the bottom.

This was probably brought up to the North Country.

First by train, probably from Boston, or somewhere along the coast, and then by wagon up to the first Connecticut lake.

But this is a, you know, a way of propelling log booms across open water.

A hard way.

So here at the end of the first Connecticut lake, there was this massive dam that had been built to regulate the water levels of this lake, to provide the motive force to send the logs downstream.

Now, when we explored underwater here at the end of the first Connecticut lake, searching for the remains of this dam, we found a lot.

There's collapsed cribs in the water right in front of us.

And as you swim around these collapsed cribs, you can see the kinds of spikes and things that we've been seeing all along.

There's an enormous tower here underwater.

It looks like a tower of some sort of a fort, almost.

And this tower comes.

It looks maybe 15, 20ft off the bottom of the lake, but it's beneath the surface.

This tower may have been part of one of the sluice gates.

Not only do we find structures from the log drive era under the lake, but we also found the rusting remains of a PBY.

Pby's are probably the most common artifact in the Connecticut from a log drive era.

PVS are a dime a dozen on the bottom of the Connecticut River.

I mean, loggers must have dropped these all the time.

>> Fred, here in the museum of the Pittsburgh Historical Society, they've got a lot of interesting tools, but one that caught my eye was this PV.

This PV is strictly for a log driver.

Look at the length of that six foot length.

>> That's a big.

>> One.

Um.

Bike end for pushing.

>> Yep.

>> The swivel hook for rolling.

I mean, that's not a light tool.

Can you imagine carrying this and using it, uh, 15 hours a day?

Well, as it went down the river.

>> Now I call it a PV, and you call it a cant hook.

>> Cant dog.

>> Cant dog.

>> Yeah.

>> All right.

>> And you use it to hook into a log like this.

So you're rolling it up and also this end on here you can get into a log and pull it out.

Pull it up.

>> Now the ones we see in the river are a lot longer.

>> Yeah.

They're longer.

>> I've seen them on the river.

This high.

>> Yeah.

>> But like I said, the ones that are taller must be all PVS then, huh?

>> Probably.

I don't know.

>> Imagine being out here in April.

The water temperature here.

Well, you can stand it, but in April it was probably 40 degrees.

The water levels would be high.

The river would be just blasting through here.

So you can imagine these rivermen.

The snow is just melted.

The water temperatures are really cold.

That water would have been carrying logs over 40ft long, two feet in diameter, and hundreds and hundreds of them be sort of just carried with a torrent.

But mixed in with those logs would have been large ice blocks.

And your job is to keep these logs being fed into the main stem of the Connecticut.

Imagine the coordination it took to pull this thing off actually strikes me as the audacity to try to pull this log drive off.

After the logs leave the tributaries of the Connecticut at its headwaters and enter the main stem.

You would think the problems would be finished, but they're not.

They just begin because it turns out the Connecticut River is not a navigable river.

It's a river that has lots of places where there's waterfalls, lots of places where there's rapids, lots of places where it's almost impossible to get a canoe through, let alone a quarter of a million logs.

And one of the most dreaded stretches of the Connecticut River was 15 Mile Falls.

15 Mile Falls was a stretch of river that occurred about 100 miles after the drive got started.

The river dropped 370ft in 15 miles.

>> Whenever you hear about.

>> The roads on the river.

>> 15 Mile Falls is often mentioned.

Now, there are probably are not many people today who ever heard of 15 Mile Falls.

And there's a good reason it doesn't exist.

But as you go up along the river, you'll come to two large dams which were put in by the power companies, the Comerford and Moore Dam.

Those two dams have flooded over that whole stretch of what was once called 15 Mile Falls.

And there were many drownings by river drivers along through there.

>> This is the site of Mulligan's pitch on 15 Mile Falls was the most treacherous stretch of the Connecticut River.

Many, many rivermen died right in this piece of water.

Right here.

Right now the whole thing looks really placid, but you get an impression for how fierce.

The river must have been here by just looking at how big this dam is, how much drop we have here.

And it's very short segment.

So after 15 mile falls, again, the problems were not finished because the Connecticut just has these waterfalls almost everywhere.

All of these difficult stretches are underwater because at every one of these places, dams have been constructed to generate electricity.

And those dams essentially flooded these whitewater rapids.

They flooded waterfalls.

There's no way to get a feeling from what the river looked like in those days.

There's no way to get a feeling for what kind of problems that these rivermen faced.

But here at Sumner Falls, here we have the last untamed part of the Connecticut River.

>> The river bosses are very careful not to put it in an inexperienced man out onto the logs, because he could endanger the lives of other people.

But as one old River boss says, it, don't do a man no good to know how to swim.

Because when they fell in, particularly if they're moving logs, there isn't much you can do.

>> When a river man drowned and they found the body, they would take his boots and hang the boots from a tree near where the drowning occurred.

And some of the people who were traveling on the Connecticut River in the 1920s and 1930s still reported seeing rotting boots hanging from branches along the Connecticut River.

>> Some years there were as many, possibly as 10 or 12 deaths before they got the log drive down to 300 miles.

Of course, most of those bodies, many of them they never found again.

But I like to show you one here that I think is outstanding.

It seems that in 1895, this young fellow drowned right here at the head of Sumner Falls, where we are now.

A young fellow 19 years old.

They said it was his first year on the drive.

His name was Charles Barber.

He came from Cherryfield, Maine.

His body went under.

They didn't find the body until, oh, quite a ways down the river.

Brought the body back here.

Notified his father in Maine.

His father came down in the wagon, took the little boy had in his pocket, plus about $300 back pay that was coming to him.

And the father said, bury him here.

So they did.

I'd never seen another grave like this.

How thoughtful of them to put him in here.

Put a stone up.

Um, right here at the spot where he died.

>> A site like this presents all kinds of problems.

And a site like this is really dangerous because what happens is that as logs start getting snagged on these ledges, logs behind those start impacting.

And pretty soon what you have is an enormous log jam start to build up, and these log jams start impounding water behind them.

So the water pressure really starts to increase.

But your job is to some way free the logs and send them down river.

>> Ah, I was born in 1909.

My father logged all the time.

He was a little guy, but he was quick on his feet.

And when they had the log jams, my father and two other guys, they called for.

Oh, God, they got out of hand.

They'd all jam in one great big group, and the men would go into the log jams with their tent hooks and loosen up the log.

They'd have to find the one log that was holding them all back, But you could get hurt.

Because when you got that out, you could start some of the other lads moving too.

>> So getting them untangled was a job, and that's where there were a lot of drownings.

But as a last resort, they would dynamite.

What they had to do was get that dynamite down underneath.

If they just dynamited the top layer, that didn't move a jam.

So they developed this technique of putting half a dozen sticks of dynamite on a long pole, working it down into the bottom with a long fuse.

The fuse would work underwater, light it, and then run so that when it did go off, it made quite a splash.

>> As the drive moves downstream into the main stem of the Connecticut.

The river itself starts to change.

The farther south we go, The more tributaries are feeding into the river, the larger the river becomes.

As river becomes broader and wider, this adds a whole new set of problems to the log drive.

Northern part of Connecticut.

A bridge can cross the river in a single span, but then as we go farther south, what we find is that bridges require multiple spans across the Connecticut, and multiple spans mean that you have to set up piers in the river on the river bed.

Now, these piers that were set across the Connecticut, they just raised havoc with the drive.

The Rivermen hated these bridges.

And sometimes when one of these logjams would be developing against these bridge piers, and this coincided with a period of high rains in the Connecticut and the water pressure that would increase, sometimes the bridge itself would be just swept away and destroyed.

And when this happened, this, of course, added a whole new cost to bringing the logs down the Connecticut River.

In addition to the multiple span bridges which gave the loggers so much troubles, the Connecticut was crossed by a series of ferries at that time.

The way these ferries work is they have these cables that cross the Connecticut.

Now these cables are about this thick in diameter.

These cables are still present in some ferry sites underwater.

When a ferry was abandoned, the cables were just dropped.

In the drive following the logs, where enormous rafts with horses and these horses were used to pull the logs off the sides of the banks in Connecticut, and they became stranded.

These horses then, are harnessed, and they're tethered to these rafts, and these rafts are floating down the Connecticut River, and they run into a ferry with cables crossing neck high.

And there are instances where actually horses were killed.

You can imagine the consequences.

Bellows Falls, Vermont.

By the time the log drive reaches here, it has traveled 170 miles.

It has 70 miles left to go before it reaches the Massachusetts sawmills.

It's very much an industrial town.

It's an industrial town based on paper mills.

The Connecticut River was dammed here, and the water was diverted into the mills of Bellows Falls, most of which were paper mills.

And the paper mills used the water in two ways.

They use it to supply power for their turbines, but they also use water in the process of making paper.

Now below the dam, there was another obstacle, and that was the Bellows Falls Gorge.

So the dam and the gorge were major impediments to the log drives.

Now the log drives reached here, typically in early summer.

Now, if a dry season coincided with when the logs were coming through Bellows Falls.

Then we had some great problems.

Who would get to use the river's water?

It turns out the mills needed the water for their function, but the log drivers needed the water to carry the logs over the dam and flush the logs down the gorge.

So who would win the conflict?

Well, invariably the log drivers won because if they were blocked, they always threatened to blow up the dam.

And if they blew up the dam, that was the end of this industry here.

Essentially, Bellows Falls comes to a halt.

The workers of these mills are laid off.

Their families go a little hungry that month.

And what happens is the businesses that are based upon those wages, they in turn also decline.

So everybody just sits here waiting for these loggers to get through here.

And it takes them sometimes as long as six weeks.

This was essentially an economic catastrophe.

Bellows Falls is on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River.

North Walpole is on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River.

During the days of the log drives, when this enormous boom was across the river here, and these loggers were working here for 4 to 6 weeks, the place they like to play in was in North Walpole, New Hampshire, not in State Bellows Falls.

In those days, North Walpole bragged about having 18 saloons, and according to the records, at any time of day, 12 of those saloons were always open.

It was also a place where the rivermen could satisfy some of their more earthy or carnal needs.

Now we know very little about the names of the women who were involved in this trade, but there is one that comes through history.

In old Colorado, she set up her tent in North Walpole, along the banks.

Now, one story that comes down is that there was a log logjam above Bellows Falls in the river, and 40 men were trying to free this logjam.

The crew boss spotted Old Colorado's tent.

So we went over there and asked, how much would you charge to sort of service the entire crew?

But she looked at the boys out in the river.

She said she would give them a job.

Lot price $18.

So the crew boss goes back to the crew, collects $0.45 from each guy, and the deal was done.

Old Colorado got her money, and she evidently consummated the deal on the banks of the Connecticut.

Now, once I got a call from some divers who'd been exploring this area, they'd found the remains of the original log boom.

They used to hold back the logs to keep them from going over the dam and down the gorge.

The day that we came out here, it was raining.

The river was divable, but the weather was horrible, so the water was just pouring, but the river was calm.

Got into the water and it just dropped right beneath the surface.

And I looked up and I'd never seen a rainstorm underwater before.

Essentially, the rain was just pelting the river skin, so causing little, little pock marks like a negative image of a rainstorm.

It's just beautiful.

We follow the anchor line down, and what I could see underwater would look like an enormous log cabin that was filled with rocks.

It looked like it stood about 10 or 15ft high off the river bed.

This is one of the artificial islands that the rivermen had constructed to hold their boom.

There was about a half a dozen of these artificial islands constructed across the riverbed in the 1920s.

A new dam was built across the Connecticut River here at Bellows Falls.

This dam was higher than the old Log Drive dam.

Consequently, a lot of the log drive era artifacts went underwater.

In addition to the remains of the of a log boom.

The divers had found something else sticking out of a bank.

On the New Hampshire side was the prow of a boat, a boat that looked just like a log drive bateau.

The prow was just sticking out of the sediment.

It was just a lucky find.

So we really don't know if this is a log drive boat, but what we do know is we found a log drive site, and it certainly looks like some of the pictures we see from that era.

I've seen a lot of photos of log drive bateaux.

In fact, I've seen a piece of a bateau underneath the Connecticut River in Bellows Falls.

But this is the first time I've seen an intact bateau.

Well, sort of intact, I guess.

Intact, as you can be after you've traveled 2 or 300 miles down the river.

And the boat we found under Bellows Falls not only has this kind of armor, but actually has almost like steel plating running around the sides here to protect it.

What's unbelievable about this boat is the men who rowed in it left their mark in it.

You can actually see the marks of the spiked boots that assigns all these marks.

And these marks.

They're all the marks of spiked boots.

The whole thing's been gouged up.

Look it over there.

You can actually see the holes.

They've almost worn the bottom of the boat out from the spiked boots.

Here's a pair of authentic river driver boots.

A lot of characteristics that are really interesting.

The most obvious one are these sharp spikes that come off the bottom.

These are called cork boots.

They help the men stick to the logs, and they also marked whatever the men walked on.

>> As the log drive moved down the river, they had to set up camps at night.

They had to feed the men.

They were up early before daybreak, and they'd work until night.

For the most part, they slept under the stars.

There are locations where they set up tents, but I'm sure that it was not always the case because men were scattered all along the river there.

They had four meals a day at least.

So you can imagine feeding the crew on a river, always on the move.

Presents.

It's a very unique problems.

>> The most important boat, the log drives was the Marianne.

The Marianne was the boat.

This boat was a floating kitchen.

They ate almost constantly.

The desserts were supposedly phenomenal.

They were donuts.

Gigantic cookies.

The men just ate like workhorses.

But that's what it took to survive on the Connecticut.

The Marianne, the cook boat was a technical marvel in the sense that it was hinged.

The actual hull was hinged so it could go over dams.

In other words, it would start up on a dam, the front end would fold down and they would sort of creep over a dam.

Many recorded instances where the cook boat comes up against the shores, and what's waiting on the shore are all the children of the local village.

The children just cheered the cook boat.

And the cook must have been enormously generous.

The young kids will come up and get free doughnuts and get cookies as big as pie plates.

>> My two brothers and I went down the river to watch the loggers.

Those donuts sure smell good.

We called out to the cook.

Are you kids hungry?

He called across the river to us.

Before we knew it, the log men were drawing straws to see who could bring those hungry little kids some donuts.

One man tried crossing with the aid of a long pike pole, but slipped on the rocks and fell into the water and lost the bag of doughnuts with much jeering.

Another one put a string through the fried cakes and suspended them around his neck, and forded the rushing stream.

When I rose up to my five foot nine inch height, I guess he was ready to throw the donuts at us.

He was a good sport anyway and we all had a good laugh.

>> By the time the drive reaches here.

It's probably July.

The logs have traveled about 230 miles.

In the 1860s, an enormous dam was built across the Connecticut River here.

This dam allowed the power of the Connecticut to be taken through the mills and factories of Turners Falls, and Turners Falls was very much an industrial town.

So as the log drive came down here, you can imagine this whole body of water slowly filling with over a quarter million logs because of the dam.

The drive comes to a halt, and this is the first time we see some of the logs being taken up and taken to the sawmills.

So a portion of the logs are destined for the Turners Falls Lumber Company.

The logs had to be sorted because the remaining logs belong to the Connecticut Valley Lumber Company.

Downstream, 25 miles, the logs destined for the Connecticut Valley Lumber Company would be sent toward the dam, and then they would be sent down an enormous wooden sluiceway, or chute that carried them over the dam.

Once they cleared the dam, they were back in the Connecticut River.

They had about a three mile stretch of whitewater rapids to traverse before they reach calm water.

There's so much activity sorting logs, sending logs over to sluice.

And yet when you look at this today, there's nothing.

This bar has been in existence since 1904.

So this bar was in existence when these guys were looking for a good time in Turners Falls.

>> We're in here throwing a couple of beers down and kicking up their heels.

Fantastic.

>> At Turners Falls, the log drive stalled.

It turns out that the Rivermen really liked Turners Falls.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Turners Falls was known for being the center of the more rowdy forms of popular culture.

In other words, it had a nice bunch of saloons and bars, had a lot of entertainments for the rivermen.

The most famous bar was the American House.

A lot of rivermen drank there.

And there's a legend that's associated with this American house that one doesn't really know if it's true or not, but boy, it's told a lot.

One evening, John L Sullivan, the world heavyweight boxing champion, was drinking at the bar.

He never really had a bit more to drink than he should have because he turns the bar and issued a challenge.

He said, I can lick any man here.

Well, down the bar were a couple of Rivermen, young bucks from up north, and one took up the challenge.

He says well, I can take you on.

So the men squared off in the bar and the Rivermen got the first punch, and it must have been a great punch because he knocked John L Sullivan out.

The buddy taps him and says do you know who you knocked out?

That's John L Sullivan.

And he then realized what a lucky punch it was and said of both of these guys, skedaddled as fast as they could.

Before Sullivan woke up, there were times when the townspeople and the rivermen clashed, and one of those times was when there was this battle between the Rivermen and the Turners Falls baseball team.

So you can imagine these two groups of young men going at it.

Now, the newspapers of the time report that after this fight, Turners Falls was full of a lot of sore heads and a lot of guys with what they called loggers, smallpox.

Now loggers.

Smallpox would be this marks left on your arms and chest, and sometimes your face where you were stomped on by spiked boots.

This stretch of water is off limits to boaters and divers.

I was really fortunate I was able to dive with the Massachusetts State Police underwater recovery team, and we explored that area.

>> What I want you to do is give me an idea of what we're looking at for depth around that island there.

>> For me, the most interesting dive from this stretch of the Connecticut is inside the prohibited zone.

It's the site of the death of George Van Dyke.

>> When we talk about river driving on the Connecticut River and logging in the North Country, the name of George Van Dyke always comes up.

He was probably the outstanding timber baron in New England, being a hard worker, clever and knowing just when to make the right moves.

He worked his way into management.

Before long he bought the company.

The acronym CVL became just part of everyday language up in the North Country.

CVL Connecticut Valley lumber.

>> I worked with old Van Dyke, God rest his soul, in pieces.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said that.

What I mean is that I hope he's in the blackest part of hell.

Rolling iron logs with a red hot Peavey.

One time in the French King Rapids, the logs jammed.

And when a couple of the gang went out to hunt the Kellogg, the jam broke.

The men ran for it, but it was no use.

Both got knocked into the water.

Of course, we ran out on the logs to help, but old Van Dyke yelled.

Never mind.

The men saved the Peaveys.

That was him.

Never mind the men.

He could get more.

But the Peaveys was property.

And property costs money.

>> Now Van Dyke was known as a very hard man.

This was a guy who was feared, respected, vilified and loved.

George Van Dyke died on August 8th, 19 online.

His automobile, a six cylinder stevens-duryea, was parked on a cliff overlooking the Connecticut downstream from the log shoot.

He was watching his men send the logs down into the Connecticut to the mills down south.

>> I was standing on a boom in the middle of the river, pushing logs over the falls and keeping one eye on Van Dyck like everyone else.

I guess the falls was making too much noise to suit him, and he wanted to get nearer so as we wouldn't miss anything he was saying, he waved the chauffeur to Back Moor.

The chauffeur acted scared and only backed a couple of feet and stopped, so Van Dyck almost lost his balance.

He turned around and said something to the chauffeur, then stood watching him, fumbling with the handles.

The man was badly rattled, I guess, with Van Dyck right there on his neck.

Almost.

Oh, the car coughed once or twice, then shot back over the cliff.

And my.

Didn't we all cheer?

>> Falls 85ft to the rocks below.

The legend has it that someone shouts from the river, save the peavey, forget the man.

The next day, on Monday.

His body was shipped by train to the North Country in northern New Hampshire for burial.

George Van Dyke's logs continued south.

Without him.

Nothing stopped the drive.

Shepard's Island, Massachusetts.

This was the most famous spot in the Connecticut River log drives.

This was the terminus of the drive.

This was the end of the drives.

So if we were to look out over this body of water a century ago, what we would see, we'd see maybe 200,000 to 400,000 spruce logs floating in the water.

In fact, the amount of spruce that would be floating here would be so enormous that the mass of logs would extend for 2 or 3 miles upstream.

That little point there, that's the end of Shepard's Island.

The Shepard's Island during the days of the log drive.

Was it a long island along the Connecticut River that formed part of this barrier system?

But today the river has changed.

And essentially what's happened is that Shepard's Island has become attached to that bank, and Shepard's Island is a small peninsula.

So what did this place look like a century ago?

Well, we found the answer to that question in the Massachusetts archives, a letter sent by the Holyoke Canoe Club to the Harbor and Land Commissioners in Boston.

And appended to that letter was a set of photographs.

They're complaining about that.

Their river was blocked with logs.

There was essentially no boating on this part of the Connecticut River from about mid-June to mid-October.

These photographs are really just invaluable because it's the first time for me.

I got some impression of what this was all about.

You could see these cribs were really high.

They weren't small things as we see left in the river.

Now.

The cribs themselves were 15ft high.

The cribs had sort of bow shaped fronts to break the water.

I'm sitting on one of the log cribs, an artificial island in the Connecticut River.

This log crib was built during a log drive era, and functioned as part of this barrier system across the Connecticut at Shepard's Island.

Now, today, there's not much left of this.

There's two of these cribs here that probably would have been 6 or 7 crossing the river in the past.

This log is actually part of the crib itself.

So you can imagine this crisscrossing kind of a Lincoln log set of crib work going up high to about 15ft, filled with trap rock, and this acting as an artificial island in the Connecticut River to help hold back the logs.

And actually, if we look closer here, we can even see one of the chains that was used to, in essence, secure the boom from crib to crib.

That was part of this barrier that's still here.

Remarkably.

Chains.

Kind of rusty, but there it is now because they sent these photographs, we now have pictures of what this site actually looked like.

In fact, to my knowledge, it's the only pictures that exist.

So if it wasn't for this letter of complaint, we would never know.

Of course, the letter of complaint as far as the boat club was concerned, was to no effect at all because the river stayed blocked with logs for years after that.

So over the lifetime of this site, from about 1869 to 1915, probably about 9 million spruce logs floated in this part of the Connecticut River.

Now, all the diving that I've done here, I've never seen one.

And then one time we came out here to dive, and something must have happened in in Connecticut, some sediment was eroded because what we found is this enormous spruce log canted in the water, just a butt end of it sticking up.

Underwater.

This thing was magnificent.

We were looking at a virgin red spruce log.

It must have been 30ft long.

We took wood samples from it.

>> We smell spruce.

>> These wood samples were then used to identify that this was a red spruce.

And so a wood sample like this would allow us to take a small section from this wood, put underneath a microscope, and actually see whether it was red spruce or something else.

And the log was red spruce.

So we left the log where it was.

I notified a museum, and the museum was anxious to take the log.

This is going to be part of an exhibit.

We came back about two weeks later and the log had vanished.

It turns out there had been a lot of storms.

The river had gone up seven feet, and that seven foot head of water was enough to move this log, and this log continued its journey downstream.

It had traveled in the previous century, 250 miles, and then it continued its journey.

100 years later, being carried downstream by the waters of the Connecticut.

And that log is lost, and all we have left of it is this wood sample to prove that it existed.

This would have been another very busy place during a log drive era.

This is the mouth of the Oxbow.

Oxbow is formed naturally in about 1840s.

They spotted this part of the river.

It's like an appendix that sort of took the logs out of the main force of the water.

The logs were caught up in a barrier at Shepherds Island.

They would then be taken down the river in rafts.

Long rafts towed by a steam tugboat.

Tugboat would come down the river and then into the mouth of the oxbow.

The oxbow here would have been used as an enormous log pond, a storage area.

Because the principal mill for the Connecticut Valley Lumber Company, the lumber company was driving these logs, was right up here in the Oxbow.

So all through the summer and into October, this little tugboat went up and down the river, moving these logs that were caught at the Shepherds Island barrier into this particular site.

Now, not all the logs went into the Oxbow.

A certain number of them were released and taken down to the Holyoke sawmill.

Once the lumber was sawn and dried, it was shipped out of the mills via the railroad, and that railroad allowed the lumber from those logs to be utilized to build the cities of Hartford, Springfield, and Holyoke.

The log drives lasted from 1870 to 1915, a total of 45 years.

They are said to have been the longest in America.

Logs were floated down to Connecticut from 250 to 300 miles, depending on what tracks were being cut.

But today there's little left of this era.

Underwater.

Log drive structures are home to fishes.

On land.

The Mount Tom sawmill and its associated paper mill are crumbling ruins.

The most significant site of the Connecticut River log drives is today a forgotten backwater of crumbling masonry and rusty machinery.

The log drive era is over and long forgotten, except sometimes.

Sometimes when you're sitting on the bank of the river early in the morning, seeing the mist rise off the water.

Sometimes you look off into the distance and you can see the silhouettes of young men, young men riding the logs.

Because once the log drive started, nothing stopped the drive.

Not even time.

>> Come gather round.

I pray you all draw near.

For the sea is pulling out.

Our last log drive is here.

The first spring thaw is overdue.

60,000,000ft will be running.

Water.