Forestry

Clearing the Forests of Hastings

Lumbermen began nibbling away at the forests of Hastings along the edges, the way a caterpillar attacks a leaf. The largest and most available trees, usually tall pines, were the first to go. And as they fell, the axemen pushed inland in search of more timber.

Not surprisingly, as in the modern world, demand for natural resources was driven by the needs of the military. Tall, stout, straight pines made ideal masts for British ships. Until 1827, in fact, all timber on public lands was reserved for the Royal Navy.

One of the first known shipments from Hastings County was in 1790, when Samuel Sherwood cut some timber five kilometres east of Trenton and floated a raft of mast material down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec City. But Hastings was still a long way from the primary market for masts, and there was little demand until the outbreak of the War of 1812.

Since rivers provided the only practical means of transport until the development of the railways, lumbermen advanced along the waterways. The Trent, its tributary the Crowe, the Moira and the Salmon River provided 19th-century water highways to ship logs to the mills in Trenton, Belleville and Deseronto.

In the north, lumbermen invaded from the east, following the Ottawa, Madawaska and York rivers in search of the giant pines of the Algonquin highlands. As early as the 1830s, the axes were ringing loud and true in the forests of what would become Carlow Township.

And if the river systems weren't perfect, the lumber companies improved them with dams and sluiceways. Baptiste Lake, now a 50 kilometre-long recreational retreat northwest of Bancroft, was formed by damming the York River at High Falls and drowning a chain of small lakes, the better to move timber. The Gilmour Company raised the level of Gull Lake by two metres so it could flush its logs down Beaver Creek to the Crowe River and thence to the Trent and its mill in Trenton. Today, when it seems difficult to float a matchstick down the Moira in a droughty summer, it is hard to imagine the amounts of wood that were driven down those rivers 150 years ago. Yet in the 1850s, as many as 175,000 logs a year floated down the Moira.