“Running the Liquid Roads”
Autobiography of Charles Chase
Written at the request of his children after he was ninety years of age.
I was born in Pine Grove Township, Warren County, Pennsylvania, on the 28th day of Feb. 1883, in a log house about one mile west of the residence of Guy C. Irvine, on a road (Lover’s Lane) running west from the state road which runs north and south, parallel with Conewango Creek. My father’s name was Reuben Chase, my mother’s, Betsey Wilson. My father descended from Rhode Island Quakers and my mother was of Scotch descent.
We moved from this place when I was very young to a small farm in the Conewango Valley about three miles above Pine Grove, now Russell. I was told that we moved from this place when I was three years old to a house near the sawmill of William and Danforth Hale. This was a small and primitive establishment of the usual kind with an old fashioned saw run by an overshot wheel. My father moved here to run this mill and assist in getting in the supply of logs to supply the same. This little mill was capable of producing all the sawed lumber needed to supply the wants of the Hale Brothers and their few neighbors. Most building material was taken direct from the forest; only the floors, windows and doors being made from sawed lumber. My father, not being required to use all his time at the saw mill, used his spare time in clearing a few acres of land located about one half mile south of the saw mill and building himself a log house in which I lived until I left home and the family lived there some years after.
At this time, the valley of the Conewango was largely covered with pine timber. Most of this was of the cork variety, which is the kind that grew large and tall and yielded a large percentage of high-grade lumber. There was very little cleared land at that time and the first thing the owner did was to clear the timber from enough of his land for cultivation so as to raise the grain and vegetable he must have to preserve the health of himself and his family and stock. In doing this he would naturally clear off his best and most productive acres, the land between the hills and along the streams. This also was the land on which grew the largest and finest timber. As there was no market for lumber the only way for him to get rid of it was to burn it. I have seen many log heaps composed largely of pine logs one to three feet in diameter burned up. There was so little use for sawed lumber at that time that it was seldom anything was taken from a pine tree above the first limb.
The roads in use, (except the roads on the east and west sides of and parallel to the Conewango Creek) were made by cutting and removing the brush and smaller trees from the right of way leaving most of the larger trees standing. They were consequently quite crooked and not very wide. Most of the travel was on foot or on a homemade wagon or sled drawn by a yoke of oxen. These wagons and sleds were made entirely of wood and put together with wooden pins. There were very few horses in the country.
When I was ten years old I left home never to return again, except as a visitor. I went to the home of my half sister, Elizabeth, the wife of John Matson who lived in Pine Grove, now Russell and remained with her for three years, then lived with my half brother, William, whose home also was in Russell, William was engaged in the business of handling lumber in the forests and on the rivers and was away much of the time. I did the chores, assisted with other work and attended the school held in the winter only, walking from one to two miles morning and night and paying my own tuition. I closed my school days by attending select schools taught by Fred Aiken and Josiah Davis, one term each. In that way I acquired sufficient education to enable me to teach school when engaged for winter terms later on.
I continued this way until the Spring of 1849 when I joined the fraternity of Lumber Jacks where I retained my membership until the Summer of 1891. My brother (1) had a contract with R. E. Fenton (2) of Jamestown, New York, to raft in Conewango Creek at Doloff’S (3) and deliver at Cincinnati, Ohio, the lumber he had piled on the bank of Conewango Creek at that place, which is several miles above Frewsburg. When school was out I was to go there and help raft in the lumber and go to Cincinnati on it as one of the “hands” as the men who pulled the oars were called. I will here chronicle my first experience as a Lumber Jack. When school closed, early in March, I had a severe cold and my brother’s wife wanted me to remain at home a few days until I should get better of it, but I wanted to go. So, she put up for me a small bundle of extra working clothes which I took under my arm and I started for Doloff’s, about fourteen miles distant from Russell. I arrived there about the middle of the afternoon, within sight of the board piles, but I was halted about fifty rods from them by water from the melted snow that covered the low flats along the creek. I could hear the men dropping the boards on the raft but could not see anyone as they were rafting at the upper end of the long piles. I shouted and made all the noise I could but failed to make anyone hear me. The flats from where I stood to the board piles were about fifty rods wide and covered with cold snow water several feet deep. I could not swim or wade that distance through that ice-cold water, so I looked about for material to build a float to push out to the board piles. I finally discovered a float already built on which somebody had ridden from the piles to the road. He had evidently landed and left it on the road but the water had risen and floated it away, lodging it on some bushes about thirty feet from shore. To get it I would have to wade out to it. This I did, brought it tot the road and fixed it up in good shape, and with a pole that lay on the float I pushed it out to the board piles and walked up the where they were making the rafts.
My brother wanted me to go to the boarding house at once and dry my clothes but it was near quitting time and I persuaded him I was not cold and would rather work until suppertime. He set me to shoving boards to two men who laid them into the piece of lumber they were rafting and I soon felt good and warm. We worked until it began to grow dark then were transported to the boarding house in a rowboat. The house stood on an elevated piece of ground completely surrounded by water.
My brother took me in the first boat load, hustled me up to the house, pulled off my cowhide boots and wet, woolen socks and I sat by the big wood fire to dry my wet clothes, went to supper with the crowd of hungry men, ate heartily, went to bed early and was lost to the world until day-break next morning when they called me to breakfast. This was my introduction to the order of Lumber Jacks. I received one great benefit from my cold-water bath; it had entirely broken up and cured my hard cold, which proves that the cold-water treatment is good for us sometimes.
I helped to finish the rafting and went as one of the hands to Cincinnati, Ohio, where that lumber was to be delivered. My brother and I stayed at Cincinnati one day and one night and I went to a Theater for the first time in my life. I can’t recall the title of the play but it was one of Shakespeare’s and Falstaff was one of the characters represented. One of the scenes was a battlefield and Falstaff, one of the combatants, was supposed to have been killed. After the battle was over and all the living had left the field, Falstaff, who was laying with the dead, rose up and looking about, rose to his feet and exclaiming, “Discretion is the better part of valor,” walked off the field. In those days a comedy always followed the feature play. In the one showed that night there was a scene of a market street in which the usual features of a market were displayed. There was an old woman walking about with a basket of eggs on her arm, a rough looking Irishman following her. He finally stole one of the eggs and stepping outside the crowd, he broke the shell and started to swallow the contents. As he did so a chicken peeped. The Irishman, making a wry face, exclaimed, “You spoke too late.”
We came back to Pittsburgh in the cabin on the main deck of a steamboat. The fare to Pittsburgh was one dollar and fifty cents and we had to furnish our own food and bedding. We walked home from Pittsburgh and reached home on the seventh day from Cincinnati. It was a great experience for me. I followed this business for several years from that time.
My brother was a skilled pilot on both the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers and he took great interest in giving me instruction in the art of rafting and running lumber. With his instruction and my own ambition to learn this business I soon became a pilot also. I made two trips every year and sometimes three and soon became as familiar with the “liquid road” of the creek and rivers all the way to Louisville as I was with the dirt and gravel roads of the country where I lived.
One spring, we left Sills’ Landing, just below Warren, with three Alleghenies. The river was high and the weather fine. We made longer runs than usual and landed our rafts in the forenoon of the fourth day out instead of late in the afternoon as we usually did. The landing was below Allegheny city in the Ohio at a place called Pork House Landing, just below Brunot's Island, the first island in the Ohio. That gave us time to couple up our Ohio Raft long before night. No pilot wants to start his raft out of Pittsburgh near night or after night has set in, for the run between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, while not very crooked, has in it more than the usual number of Island Towheads and gravel bars. Daylight is best for that run. Furthermore, a raft needs to be floated for one day in daylight that the Pilot may learn how well it is balanced and the average miles it is making per hour before he attempts to run it after dark.
I paid off my Pittsburgh men and set my Ohio crew to coupling up our Ohio. They expected to get the raft all ready for the trip to Louisville before nightfall, ready for the usual morning start, and they would have a chance to go up to the city in the evening, attend the theatre and have a good time generally. Most of my Ohio men were young men and looking forward to opportunities like these. Nor can you find it in your heart to blame them for once you were young yourself.
But a few of the older men of the crew, including myself, knew from experience that all of these boys would be tired and sleepy next morning, and some of them so filled with corn and rye juice that they would be in an unfit condition to pull one of those heavy oars next morning and we would have to lay where we were the next day until late afternoon and let them sleep off their weariness, so we had a different plan for this trip. We proposed to start out when the raft was all ready, float it down the river 30 or 40 miles, land, take a good night’s rest and light out the next morning. When the raft was ready I directed the oarsmen to go to their oars to see if they worked all right, and one of the older men to go to the post where the cable that held the raft was tied. I set the boys to pulling away from the shore, raised my hand in pre-arranged signal to the man on the shore – and we were afloat. Of course the boys were more or less disgruntled at the trick, but in the end expressed themselves as glad I had played it on them. We floated down the river about 30 miles and landed before sundown in an eddy called SAFE HARBOR, had our supper and went to bed.
The next morning at daybreak I got out of my bunk and went to take a look at the weather. It was quite clear and cool and I felt a little suspicion of fog though none was to be seen in any direction, and returned again to my bunk for an hour or more of sleep until the sun was up, then went out again to see of there were any indications of fog. There was none anywhere. I made up my mind there would not be any, called the boys, and out we pulled.
The river from Safe Harbor to East Liverpool is full of rocky bars on the shores and is, on the whole, a dangerous stretch of river. There is one very dangerous island, called Line Island because it is located right on the line between Ohio and Pennsylvania, which has caught up in its day, a great many rafts. We had floated down about three miles and were passing an island just above a short bend in the river, when I saw a bank of fog that a light breeze was pushing slowly up the river. I knew we were in for it good and devilish. This is a dangerous stretch of the river on which to float such large rafts even under favorable conditions – in a fog the task was appalling. We were soon swallowed up in the mist so thick you could not see an object fifty feet away. I had only two choices, to try to land the raft or go on land have it land itself on a rock pile. I knew the shores on both sides of the river thoroughly. There was no possible chance on the right hand shore and none at all on the left.
There is a little old village on a high bluff on the left bank, about three miles above Line Island, called Georgetown. Just below the town, around a sharp bend opposite and island is a clean, smooth gravel beach with a clump of several sycamore trees at the head. That beach, a good half mile long, was the only possible place where a raft the size of the one I was running could possible land. The sharp bend was the problem. It would be impossible to get the hind end of the raft where all the snubbers were, near enough to get a cable to the trees. The only way to get the raft to the beach was to run it head first, tie the cables to the trees, use the cross couplings for snubbers and land the raft while it was swinging around. I knew this would work all right if I could locate the beach in the fog, engineer the raft to strike it in the right place and get our cables to the trees.
I recalled that there was a ferry across the river here and I knew that if I could see the wire when we went under it I would know at what angle our raft lay relative to the shore. I saw the wire, saw that our raft was pointed sharply toward the left hand shore and the gravel beach and that we would surely hit it. As the raft went ploughing up the beach, we landed nicely without doing the least harm to anybody or anything. The cook got us a good breakfast to which we did honor in full measure. The fog was dissipated by 9 o'clock. We hauled our cable on board, floated down below Line Island, swung our raft right end to and had no further trouble that trip.
End of Part I,
Stepping Stones. Warren, PA: Warren County Historical Society, Vol. 8, No. 2., 1964.
Charles Chase Recollections
“I first saw the light,” wrote Charles Chase for the Times Mirror in 1923, “sometime during the 28th day of February, 1833, in a log house built by my father on land he owned in Pine Grove Township located on the road now leading from the new state road just below Bachops to Lander. My father sold this land and we moved to new quarters before I realized that I was living and when I did realize that fact we were living in a house that stood on a high bank above a small sawmill near Wm. Hale’s residence, built by Mr. Hale and his brother, Danforth, who in partnership with his brother William owned a large tract of land extending to the Conewango Creek. My father ran this mill when there was sufficient water to turn the great overshot wheel that furnished power and worked at clearing up and cultivating the land when there was not sufficient water to run the mill. There was but a small percentage of the land cleared then. The hills and valleys were covered with a heavy growth of timber for which there was little or no market. But the people had to live and they had to secure the things to live on from the soil and to enable them to this they had to clear the timber from the land and dispose of it in the only way it could be done. After taking out that needed to use in the construction of the crude buildings they had to have to protect themselves and their animals from the vicissitudes of the weather and for the rails needed to build fences around their fields they had to burn the balance of the timber and clear the ground for cultivation. I have seen many thousands of feet of clear pine lumber rolled into log heaps with maple, beech and birch and burned to ashes. We hear men nowadays frequently criticize these old pioneers for so wasting the timber. This criticism is unjust for they had to have use of the land to produce what they had to have to preserve their own lives and that of their families.”
“The comparatively few families living in Pine Grove township (outside the village of Russell) were more or less scattered and neighborly communication was somewhat difficult and had to be carried on mostly by walking. There were very few horses owned in the township oxen being mostly used for transportation purposes and other things in that time. The roads outside the main thoroughfares up and down the Conewango Creek were not much used by neighbors in daily communication. They took the shortest path across the fields or over well marked trails through the woods.”
“I can remember my first trip to what is now Russell. My mother called it “going down to the dam”. That is what it was then called. We lived about one and a half miles north of the Dam. With the exceptions of three or four small clearings with a few buildings the road was through the woods. I had never been where I could see any buildings but farmhouses and barns and not more than a dozen people together. Now to see a big city of twenty or thirty houses and two or three hundred people was a wonderful sight to me. I can’t say anything about Warren at that time before I saw Warren. My first visit to Warren was to attend (as I recall it) a County Sunday School picnic. The picnic was held under the shade of apple trees in an orchard that was planted on the land in the neighborhood of the East Street School House and the residence of Judge Rice. I saw nothing of Warren after that until some years later. I was taking rides on rafts being run over the rapids between Russell and Warren just for the fun of walking back through the mud to Russell. This experience qualified me to (a few years later) take active part in the game, first as a raftsmen and lumber jack, then as a pilot from the Conewango Creek in Pennsylvania to the City of Louisville, Kentucky, then as a contractor to raft and deliver by Rivers, lumber to the people from Pittsburgh to Louisville, Ky., until delivering lumber by water was changed to delivering it by rail. Now there is very little lumber in this region of any kind or grade to be delivered anywhere. Surely we are living in a new and wonderful word, is it a better one?”
1. William Chase eventually went to the Dakotas.
2. R. E. Fenton – later Governor of New York State during the Civil War.
3. Doloff’s – a lumber mill and camp between Falconer and Frewsburg in Chautauqua County, New York. The house stood until about 15 years ago.
4.Mr. Chase uses the vernacular here. The Lumbermen always “run the river.” They never “ran it.”
Warren Mail: April 29, 1873 “Great times at Warren yesterday. The river was too high to run. The eddy is full of rafts of lumber and more too. Our borough is running over with raftsmen. There are only two whiskey saloons in town—what a business they are doing. The circus is showing across the river. Lots of people outside who couldn’t get in. Lots inside who couldn’t get out. Everybody tight on the inside. All intoxicated on the outside and the balance drunk on the underside. Even the Allegheny was high, the Conewango on a bender and the Suspension Bridge on a tear”.
1883, April 13—Warren Ledger. Col. John H. King started down river last Tuesday. He made his first trip down river fifty years ago when he was 13. He is now 63.
April 5, 1850—Capt. William Hannah of the Steamboat “Allegheny Bell” No. 2 reported he passed at least a hundred rafts—making it very difficult to steer his steamboat. Talking of lumbermen returning by steamboat, he pronounced the lumbermen the finest specimens of robust, healthy men he ever beheld—
Every boy of 14 felt it necessary to go down river on a raft—and woe to the parent who tried to stop him. The pilots in their red jackets and green skull caps were as much his heroes as Davie Crockett is to a boy today. The women of the Baptist Church were so concerned over several dozen of these boys marooned in Warren awaiting a rise of water in 1848 that they established a club where they could meet.
Warren Gazette, March 11, 1826: The big harvest of our county is again at hand—lumber. All the streams are in fine order fur running and most of our citizens have gone down the river. So much so that very few were at court.
Stepping Stones. Warren, PA: Warren County Historical Society, Vol. 8, No. 3. 1964.