TIMBER RAFTS – In 1764 former sailor Daniel Skinner (1733-1813) of Callicoon, N.Y., fastened together a batch of logs – six 70-foot pines – and floated them from the Catskill Mountains down the Delaware River to Philadelphia for use as ship's masts. Although one of his two helpers drowned on the four-day trip, he rated it a success and continued doing it.
Lumberjacks would use winter snow to slide the logs down to the riverbank and wait for the spring freshet. They would bind the logs into rafts, ranging from 1,000 square feet up to 8,000 square feet (40 by 200 feet). They were held together with “lash poles,” saplings placed at right angles to the logs, secured with pieces of elm or old horseshoes. (The accompanying photo shows one of the smaller rafts.)
The raftsmen would launch the rafts when the river was high enough to carry the logs over rocks and shallows that would normally stop them. The high water would occur in April and sometimes in October.
Some of the rafts were made of sawed beams, some of 3-inch-thick planks, some of round poles for warf pilings, and many more were made up of logs, peeled or unpeeled. Some rafts carried “top loads” of slate for Philadelphia sidewalks, charcoal or stacks of milled lumber.
Most of the rafts originated in the Catskills, but some entered the river farther down. Some went all the way to Philadelphia, but many were shortstopped along the way, supplying sawmills in Easton and Lumberville, Pa., and Frenchtown, among others. This is were the timber came from to build the 19th-century houses in Frenchtown. All those softwood floors used to stand tall in the Catskills.
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The timber rafts were really hard to steer. Any boater knows that when a vessel is going the same speed as the surrounding water, a rudder won't work. So steering had to be done with 40-foot sweeping oars.
According to Louise E. Smith, a Sullivan County, N.Y., historian and author, rafts of 25 by 75 feet were crewed by four men, two in the front and two in the back, each end of the raft equipped with a steering oar. Each oar had an 8-foot blade of hemlock attached to a long pole made of chestnut, ash or basswood.
To say that these rafts floated or drifted would be accurate, but misleading. They were swept downstream when the river was at its highest and fastest, always in April, but sometimes in October, too. They were big and unwieldy. Slow-moving ferry boats where often run over, providing an added incentive for building bridges. Once the bridges were built in the mid-1800s, it was the raftsmen's turn to be frightened, as they struggled to maneuver their clumsy rafts between the stone piers.
In “The Delaware Canal” (1967) Robert J. McClellan quotes old-timer Harry Warford, “It took a dang good man to take a raft through the rapids. Once she got started downstream, there was no stopping her in the current. That gave the rafts right-of-way over barges (canal boats) crossing the river and sometimes there were feuds between the raftsmen and the bargemen...
“The raftsmen always guided their loads of lumber through the opening at Wells Falls (New Hope) by pulling the raft in line with the second window in the (covered) bridge from the Lambertville side, and heading her towards Bowman's Hill. When the flood took out this section in 1903, it more than just damaged the bridge – it played heck with the raftsman's guiding point. The first man down after this catastrophe couldn't quite remember where the window had been, so he steered his raft by guess and by golly.
“Yep, you guessed it – he was off his mark by several feet and crashed into the wall of the wing dam. His load of timber loosened, going every which way, but mostly downstream – and into the water went the crew. Nobody was drowned, but when that raftsman finally surfaced and found a place to crawl up on, he was plenty mad.”
A more famous incident occurred upstream at Port Jervis, N.Y., in April of 1869. The Van Amburgh Circus had to cross the Delaware for an engagement in Milford, Pa., but the bridge was too rickety to support a 5-ton elephant; so the pachyderms would have to wade across.
Consequently a notoriously murderous beast named Tippoo Sahib had walked half-way across the river, when Frank Walker's 140-foot-long raft of hemlock logs came rushing at him. This infuriated the hot-tempered elephant and he attacked the raft.
Reports vary on what happened next. Either the raftsmen fended him off with their huge oars, or the crew swam for their lives and the unmanned raft broke up on the rocks downstream.
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Navigating the swollen river in darkness was too risky, so rafts would tie up for the night in “eddies,” places where the river was deep and slow.
The deep, slow stretch of river immediately north of Milford was used for overnight layovers. It was known as Holihan's Eddy. In May of 1880 the Milford Leader gives a glimpse of the commercial aspect of the layovers, reporting that Holihan's had 117 raftsmen for breakfast, averaging 10 buckwheat cakes per man, and that Gwinner's can accommodate 104 raftsmen in its 52 beds, with as many as two-dozen in one room.
In 1875 raft traffic was peaking at about 3,000. In April 30, 1880, the New York Times reported that there were 2,000 rafts on the river north of Easton, Pa. “Old citizens say they never saw the trade better.”
“Delaware Canal Journal” by C.P. Yoder (1972) gives 1875-1885 as the peak years of raft traffic down the river.
M.D.L. Shrope reminisced in the Frenchtown Star that in the 1890s “it was no surprise to see a score or more rafts pass down the river from early dawn until the shades of darkness. The rafts, huge floating masses, were mostly composed of 'saw logs' (trimmed logs with the bark on) and shaved timber, with an occasional one composed of rails or railroad ties and piling.”
On April 25, 1901, the Milford Leader reported, “A few rafts from the upper Delaware are still running down the river to the lumber market at Trenton. What a change in the rafting business on the Delaware river – where there are now two or three rafts tied up one night at Holihan's Eddy, above town, several years ago there were as many as two hundred rafts tied up there in one night and you could practically almost walk across the river on the sawed lumber and log rafts. The standing timber at the headwaters of the Delaware river is almost all cut off.”
The Holihans, for whom the eddy is named, operated an inn that served the raftsmen who tied up in the eddy for the night. It later became the Upper Black Eddy Inn. In recent years it was demolished.
In February of 1903 the Star forecast that only 100 rafts could be sent down from the Catskills that spring.
In 1911 a single, large raft swept by, and it merited mention in the Star. The last log raft rushed past Frenchtown in 1913, according to Leslie C. Wood in “Rafting on the Delaware River” (1934). It was going from Dillontown, N.Y., to Bordentown.
From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"
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