Old-time chopper’s axes leave their mark on history
My last column about a Nipissing Road stopping place called the Bummer’s Roost quoted the writings of an amateur historian like myself named Everett Kirton. Born in 1894 and raised at Loring, Ontario, Everett had a keen interest in the early days of northern Parry Sound District. In his senior years, he composed a series of historical essays on the communities making up the region.
When I joined the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests in 1949, I soon got to know Everett as the chief ranger’s clerk in the department’s Powassan office. He chose his words carefully and spoke in a clear, measured manner that was pleasing to the ear. A made-to-order subject for my tape recorder when I started collecting oral history, he crops up here and there in some of my books.
Today’s column also quotes Everett Kirton, this time from a letter he wrote me in 1972, and which I recently happened upon while looking for something entirely unrelated. In those days, we both were actively collecting old logging artifacts and exchanging notes on the subject. The axe, of course, was the woodsman’s principal tool, and here is what Everett had to say about the vital instrument:
“With reference to the old-time chopper’s axes, they were quite big, weighing about six or eight pounds each, and they had quite a long handle, about three-and-a-half or four-feet long. It was necessary to have handles that long so that the choppers could chop the big pine trees. I remember once, two of my brothers and I were in the woods north of Loring, between the Wolf River and Etta Lake. We sat down on an old log to have a smoke and rest. Before leaving, we took note of the log we were sitting on. It was the butt of a pine log taken out many years before. The stump was between three-and-a-half and four-feet through. The tree was chopped down, leaving the stump about four feet high. There was a hollow in the butt about six inches across, so it was butted with the axe about 16 feet up. This was left in the bush due to the small hole. It was topped 32 feet (further) up, as that was where the first limbs started. At this point it was still two feet in diameter, but they did not want knotty timber.”
The log on which the Kirton brothers took their rest that day undoubtedly was left behind by men making a square timber for the British market. Sending second-grade wood thousands of miles across the Atlantic did not make economic sense, so felling a pine for the square -timber market was akin to shooting a moose for its hind quarters. However, that was the fate of the noblest white pines that ever grew in Ontario. I was born many years after Everett Kirton but I, too, remember seeing the moldering remains of the butts and tops of such trees during the woodland rambles of my youth.
It took specialized axes, particularly the broad axe of which I have written in the past, to make square timbers. But the heavy, long-handled chopping axes that Kirton spoke of were also essential to the task. First for chopping down the tree, but also for “scoring” the felled trunk with deep notches to prepare it for the hewer’s broad axe. Such an axe-head, worn down from use but still decidedly heftier than those we used, kicked around our implement shed when I was a kid. My Dad explained it was a “score-hacker’s axe,” wielded by a man who stood on the trunk of a felled pine and chopped notches in the flanks ahead of the hewer. It took a long-handled axe to do that. When Dad was a youngster, a father-and-son team named French had boarded with the family while hunting down and harvesting prime pines at the back of our farm for square timbers.
It was the Frenches’ leavings, by then reduced to moss-covered mounds of rotting wood, that I marvelled at fifty years later.
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