Up the Gatineau! Articles
The following article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 49.
Our Cantley Bush Lot
Hubert McClelland
There was no energy crisis in Cantley a century or more ago as long as you had a woodlot you could harvest. Most farms of 100 to 200 acres had a bush lot on them, or nearby. In Cantley’s earliest days, oil and coal were not readily available, so bush lots provided a critical supply of firewood for the farmhouse, both for cooking and heating, 365 days a year.
In winter, when the cow herds were no longer milking, the farmers worked their bush lots to harvest logs for firewood, for repairs of horse-drawn implements such as wagons and sleighs, or for sale for lumber or pulpwood. In Cantley, the pulpwood was mostly spruce, balsam and poplar. Before debarking equipment was brought into the pulp and paper mills, farmers who sold balsam and spruce pulp were paid extra if they removed the bark. This was an onerous job to take on by hand, and required a special bark peeling knife. Some farms also had good stands of cedar in swampy areas, which could be sold for fence posts or for buildings and fences.
On our family farm the bush lot was three lots to the west, a couple of kilometres away, on hilly terrain where the federal Gatineau Satellite Station is now located. To effectively extract logs from it we needed snow-covered ground, and I recall my own role in the bush lot, as a youth growing up in the 1950s.
After Christmas, when we had enough snow, my dad, Trevellyn McClelland, would break a trail with a team of horses and sleighs to the area of the bush lot where he planned to cut. Working in the bush was a two-person job, for safety, and for the strength required to cut and load logs onto the sleighs.
The tools were axes, swede saws and crosscut saws. (Chainsaws came into wide use only well after the Second World War.) A swede saw could be used by one person, but the crosscut saw was a two-person saw, and was usually the one used to fell the tree after it had been notched to determine the direction of the fall.
How much wood did a family need for a year to heat the home and cook the meals every day, including some summer meal preparation? Bear in mind that in the dead heat of summer, most farms had a “summer kitchen,” a place where coal oil was often used for cooking, which reduced firewood use.
Our farmhouse had two floors, with four bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, and a kitchen, dining room and living room downstairs (and that main floor had an 11-foot ceiling). For our family of five, it took all of 11 or 12 “bush” or “full” cords1 to do the heating and cooking for 12 months.
My dad and his great-uncle, William, would cut enough wood to fill a skidway about 30 to 35 feet long and 12 feet wide, with the wood piled 4 feet high. This meant a load of just a little over a bush cord, which subsequently had to be cut into 12-inch logs, split and piled high in the woodshed for the next season. In total, almost 34 face cords were needed to keep our three stoves going all winter long. Even at that, our farmhouse was cold on the downstairs floor, and in some places the water pipes froze on a very cold day.
Our inventory for working the bush lot would include several axes for both chopping and splitting, a swede saw, and a crosscut saw. As well, we needed wedges for keeping tree cuts open while sawing, and a cant hook for rolling logs over the ground when they were too heavy to lift.
We would attach several chains with hooks to the logs and the trees for skidding the wood to the skidway, for loading them on the sleighs, and for attaching logs to the sleighs to haul them from the forest. We also would place several small chains, with a hook and ring on the end, around the sleigh runners. These would act as brakes when going downhill with a heavily loaded sleigh.
A key essential was a good team of horses with a harness for pulling the load. The team was also equipped with a “britchin”—a leather strap around the haunches of each horse. The britchin allowed the team to push back against the load when going downhill, preventing the loaded sleigh going faster than the horses could move, which would have resulted in a loss of control. The team could stop or slow the load from going too quickly by sitting back against the britchin, which pushed against the tongue of the sleigh.
The set of sleighs we used were called “bobsleighs,” which is two sleighs attached together with a rack on them to pile the wood. To the front sleigh was attached the tongue, a long wooden pole on which the whippletrees2 were attached. When the team was attached to the sleighs, each horse was on an opposite side of the tongue, which controlled the movement of the sleigh to right or left, for turning or backing up.
To ensure the harvest of sufficient wood for the winter, my father and my uncle would usually go to the bush every day from early January on to cut a load of wood. This would be after the cattle had been fed and the manure cleaned out. Assuming there had been enough good weather days for working in the bush, by the end of February or early March they would have the 11 to 12 bush cords of wood cut, hauled and piled on a skidway in our barnyard.
In late March or early April, they would get the circular saw sharpened and installed at the front end of the wood pile skidway. This saw was powered by a stationery gas engine that was water-cooled and equipped with a set of huge and heavy fly wheels. These wheels maintained the speed momentum of the engine while cutting through a log on the table of the circular saw. The engine drive wheel was connected by a belt drive to the circular saw.
In springtime, our neighbours took turns helping with the wood sawing, cutting the long trees in the pile into foot-long sticks of wood. It generally took about a full day with three to five men, operating the circular saw and engine, to cut our 11 to 12 cords into one-foot sticks of wood. Any blocks of cut wood that were too large to fit in a kitchen stove would need to be split into smaller sizes, which were also easier to handle in the kitchen.
At our farm my dad and the hired man would tackle that hard task for several days until the whole pile was ready to be stored in our woodshed. This building was close to our farmhouse door, and was about 12 by 15 feet, with one end open. I got to help store and pile the wood in the woodshed, which we would fill about 8 to 9 feet high. Every day after school in fall and winter it was my job to fill the kitchen wood box next to the wood stove.
We never clear cut our woodlot. Years later, I took a woodlot management course when I was studying for my Bachelor of Science in Agriculture. I learned that, without resorting to overcutting or clear cutting, one could easily harvest one bush cord of wood per acre per year from a reasonably managed woodlot. On my own 20 acres of poor bush on my pasture farm, I have been cutting dead elm, ash and other trees for the past 18 years, without reducing the number of trees nor the growth on the land.
- A bush cord, also known as a full cord, is 4 feet high, 8 feet long and 4 feet deep. A face cord is a third of that size, at 4 feet high, 8 feet long and 16 inches deep.
- A pivoted or swinging bar to which the traces, or tugs, of a harness are fastened, and by which a carriage, a plow, or the like, is drawn.