WILLOW CREEK — The last log drive on the Mattawamkeag River system ended on June 3, closing a chapter in northern Maine’s economic history that stretched back more than 140 years.
The final drive was a modest affair — 800 logs, mostly white pine and spruce, floated from the upper West Branch down to the sorting boom at the Willow Creek bridge. The logs were pulled from the river by a diesel-powered crane, loaded onto trucks, and hauled to the mill for processing.
An 82-year-old river driver named Elmer Bouchard, who had worked on the drives since 1908, was on hand to witness the final day. “The first drive I worked on, we had oxen,” Bouchard said, leaning on a peavey that had been his since 1912. “The men wore wool pants and caulk boots. We slept in canvas tents and ate salt pork and beans. This — ” he gestured at the diesel crane — “this is not a log drive. This is a salvage operation.”
Bouchard’s career spanned the entire arc of the log drive era. He began during the peak years, when the Mattawamkeag system carried two million logs annually. He worked through the decline, when truck logging and rail transport gradually replaced river transport. And he returned for the final day, because, he said, “a man owes it to the river to see the end of things.”
The Gazette published Bouchard’s first-person account of the drives as a special feature, recording his descriptions of river driving at its most dangerous: “You walked on the logs like you’d walk on pavement. If you fell in, you went under and you didn’t come up. We lost a man every three or four years. That was the price.”
The end of the log drive means the end of the spring river-clearing ritual that had defined the town’s calendar for generations. “I’ll miss the sound,” Bouchard said. “The sound of a thousand logs grinding against the banks in the spring runoff. It was the sound of the woods coming down to meet the town.”