192 FORESTRY IN NEW ENGLAND 



and pearl ash which they sold in Montreal and Boston. After 

 the admission of Vermont to the Union a great industry grew 

 up which Robinson in his entertaining history of the state de- 

 scribed thus: "The great pines that fifty years before had been 

 reserved for the 'masting of His Majesty's navy/ were felled now 

 by hardy yeomen who owed allegiance to no earthly king, and 

 gathered into enormous rafts, voyaged slowly down the lake, 

 impelled by sail and sweep. They bore as their burden barrels 

 of potash that had been condensed from the ashes of their 

 brethren whose giant trunks had burned away in grand con- 

 flagration that made midnight hills and vales and skies bright 

 with lurid flame. The crew of the raft lived on board, and the 

 voyage (down Lake Champlain and the Richeheu to Canada) 

 though always slow was pleasant and easy when the south wind 

 filled the bellying sail, wafting the ponderous craft past the 

 shifting scene of level shore, rocky headland, and green islands." 

 For years these great rafts of timber went north to Montreal 

 where they were exported, but with the completion of the canal 

 joining the Lake with the Hudson, the current of traffic was 

 turned in the other direction. Finally the timber of the Cham- 

 plain valley was gone and the products of Canadian forests now 

 supply the trade of Burlington, still one of the busiest lumber 

 markets of New England. 



There is no better picture of the condition of the Maine forests 

 and the industries dependent upon them in the middle of the 

 last century than in Thoreau's "Maine Woods." "Think how 

 stood the white pine tree on the shore of Chesuncook, its 

 branches soughing with the four winds, and every individual 

 needle trembhng in the sunhght — think how it stands with it 

 now, sold, perchance to the New England Friction-Match Com- 

 pany. There were in 1837, as I read, two hundred and fifty saw- 

 mills on the Penobscot and its tributaries above Bangor and they 

 sawed two hundred millions of feet of boards annually. To this 

 is to be added the lumber of the Kennebec, Androscoggin, Saco, 

 Passamaquoddy, and other streams. No wonder that we hear 

 so often of vessels which are becalmed off our coast, being sur- 



