The Pemi Wilderness--Some History

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Waumbek

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The controversy over the suspension bridge has sent me to the maps I have of the Pemi, then to any written sources I could find ready to hand. The area is rich with history, and with hiking history, and I am not aware of any book that charts that history fully. This thread is not intended to be a full account by any means, but I invite anyone else interested in the Pemi to contribute notes or more developed sections or reminiscences or questions to it as you wish. However, please do not debate the suspension bridge, wilderness policy, or bacon grease here. There's another well-established thread for that.

The Pemigewasset Wilderness (along with Mount Carrigain) came into its own as a separate section of the AMC Guide (WMG), ironically, with the completion of the Kancamagus Highway in 1959. Before that, "Pemigewasset Wilderness Trails" were bundled into the WMG section, "North Woodstock and Vicinity." Early on, trampers could hop a ride on the logging railroad from Lincoln almost to the Bondcliff Trail; after the trains stopped running, the logging railroad still "form[ed] a convenient route for trampers." But with the completion of the Kanc in 1959, a gravel road that "affords the closest approach to the Wilderness from the W or S" and "cuts through the middle of a vast wilderness area and links ...North Woodstock...to North Conway" (WMG 1960), hikers could drive right to it, and the Pemi gained its own separate status in the WMG. The 1960 WMG appears a bit daunted by its newly prominent and unwieldy wilderness entry: "this section covers all but a small portion of the region drained by the East Branch of the Pemigewasset River, and includes the poorly defined and extensive area known as the Pemigewasset Wilderness." (cont.)
 
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It contained some truly amazing forest before it was cut. The area around Anderson Brook and Cedar Brook produced massive red spruce. One thing I never found was if natives americans ever actally lived there. I like to think how massive the area used to be before the Kanc was build. To combine the Sandwhich and Pemi into one would have been quite a hike. I did read a lot about it's history in Logging in the Whites books. They used to ride along the trains and shoot deer off them. Also I thought it was interesting that they made bikes that could attach to the rails.

-Mattl
 
It contained some truly amazing forest before it was cut. The area around Anderson Brook and Cedar Brook produced massive red spruce. One thing I never found was if natives americans ever actally lived there. I like to think how massive the area used to be before the Kanc was build. To combine the Sandwhich and Pemi into one would have been quite a hike. I did read a lot about it's history in Logging in the Whites books. They used to ride along the trains and shoot deer off them. Also I thought it was interesting that they made bikes that could attach to the rails.

-Mattl

That'd be interesting to know. I've always been curious about that so I did a little reseach into that and was not able to come up with anything to indicate that they did. If anyone has found otherwise I'd be happy to read about it.
 
Ed Clark

Ed Clark (85), a founder of Clark's Trading Post and the White Mountain Central Railroad, died yesterday. He was a mechanical genius with a passion for rescuing and restoring steam engines of all kinds, including early locomotives and log loaders. The final resting home of one (or more) of J. E. Henry's East Branch & Lincoln RR line engines is at Clark's. If you want to see what used to run on those railroad ties you walk across on Pemi trails, you can find it at Clark's.

http://www.whitemountaincentralrr.com/SteamLoco5

http://unionleader.com/article.aspx...rticleId=5418132d-fe11-417d-aae7-4e8b9fc8a158
 
What follows are provisional thoughts about what the Pemi has meant to the history of ideas about the White Mountains. Please feel free to comment, criticize, refine, refute. I haven’t decided whether I’m being too hard on J. E. Henry, demonizing him excessively. After all, we walk on some trails in the Pemi courtesy of his EB&L logging railroad. I have not had a chance to look at either the 1964 federal wilderness act or the 1984 NH wilderness act and to think about how they figure into this. That’s probably next.
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The Pemi gained a reputation—and a name—as a wilderness, the very “heart” of the White Mountains, just after the mid nineteenth century. Drawing upon Charles Huntington’s accounts of explorations of the Pemi, in 1876 Moses Sweetser observed that the “term Pemigewasset has been applied to the great wilderness which surrounds the East Branch and its tributaries.” Ignoring any possibility of Native American habitation, the numerous fishing trails, and other human influence, Sweetser argued that the region was “still in a condition of primeval wildness and has not been invaded by clearings, roads, or trails . . . its stately trees yet undeveloped into sashes and blinds.”

The idea of the Pemi as a primeval wilderness devoid of any human interference developed in the larger context of the perception of the White Mountains according to ideals of nineteenth century European Romanticism. Thomas Starr King and other early guide book writers saw the White Hills through the lens of the old world; for them the White Mountains were the “Switzerland of America.” The White Mountain school of artists had earlier visualized exaggerated craggy peaks in our local landscape fit to compete with the most awe inspiring mountains that Europe had to offer. Part and parcel of the creation of the White Mountains as a remote and majestic range capable of thrilling and even terrifying the viewer was the notion of the wild and impenetrable region that lay at its center, its untrammeled, mysterious, even desolate core. If the Pemi had not existed, early guide book writers would have had to invent it as the canvas on which to project their ideas of what Nature meant to humans. Perhaps for that reason, the perception of the Pemi as a “wilderness” untouched by humans persisted long after lumber baron J. E. Henry had begun to systematically strip the region of any vestige of wildness.

By 1882, the groundwork for the actual assault on the Pemi’s relatively undeveloped state was being laid: rail lines were extended as far north as North Woodstock, providing a direct commercial link as well as tourist route from the White Mountains to Concord NH and then to southern New England. Ten years later, 1892, Henry’s logging company moved into Lincoln.

Henry’s previous depredation of the Zealand Valley was well known, and the alarm was raised about his threat to the Pemi. In an 1893 New York Times article, “Devastating the White Mountains,” the unidentified writer warns that the destruction of the forest around Fabyan’s and Zealand is “about to be introduced into the very heart of the White Mountain wilderness,” “the choicest part of the wilderness section of the White Mountains”:

“It is this region that is now doomed to the kind of destruction that the locusts brought on Egypt when they ate up everything that was before them. The forest along the river is to be cut off clean. . . . . By the contracts already made, the Pemigewasset wilderness will be destroyed during the coming winter. . . .”

It took Henry’s “swarm of locusts” longer than the winter of 1893-1894 to destroy the Pemi, but by the first decade of the twentieth century, his logging crews had stripped the west side of the Bonds and a few years later completed massive clear cutting on Carrigain and Hancock. Their depredation continued until 1940. In 1936, the Forest Service was obliged to close a major portion of Pemi because the slash left over from such unrestrained logging posed immense fire hazard.

Six successive editions of the AMC hiking guide from 1917 to 1931 appear to acknowledge that Henry had reduced the heart of the White Mountains to something less than the fabled primeval forest so integral to nineteenth century views of the meaning of this region. The area about the headwaters of the East Branch, they note, is “formerly known as the Pemigewasset Wilderness,” an apparent allusion to the effect of Henry’s wood butchery on the untrammeled forest. But, as one reads on in these six guide books, there is no mention of the devastation of vast areas of the Pemi, the despoiling of the Pemi’s pristine state, the difficulty of finding and following trails. Instead, the rubric “Pemigewasset Wilderness Trails” soon crops up in these editions and informs trampers to use the convenient route that the logging railroad offers into the “wilderness.”

In fact, “formerly” does not actually cede the Pemi’s wilderness status in the face of the reality of Henry’s brutal domestication of this region. It is almost certainly a typographical error. The 1916 edition of the WMG, the first to include the East Branch drainage, had noted that the region is “familiarly known as the Pemigewasset Wilderness.” In the subsequent 1917 edition, “familiarly” morphed into “formerly” and stood uncorrected for the next fifteen years through five more editions. It was a Freudian slip, revealing the actual state of the Pemi, with its miles of rails, mountains of slash, tons of trash, and burned over hillsides, but the idealized White Mountains continued to require a wilderness at its center to accompany its lofty peaks.

Proofreaders at the WMG woke up in 1934 and corrected the typo. From the 1934 to 1955 editions, the East Branch drainage was introduced as the “so-called Pemigewasset Wilderness,” an acknowledgement of the ineptness of the term in the face of Henry’s destructiveness, but, at the same time, a retention of the term. The 1960 edition dropped “so-called” and the Pemi was once more termed a wilderness, unqualified. Ironically, the year before saw the completion of a highway, the Kanc, through this wilderness. By then, however, conceiving of the Pemi as a wilderness in the face of reality—railroads or auto roads--had become tradition.

From 1969 to 1983, the WMG reverted to its ambivalent stance about the wild Pemi, placing the word “Wilderness” in the rubric “Pemigewasset Wilderness” in quotation marks. But the older romantic view prevailed again in 1987; the quotation marks were removed. The Pemi was once more imaged as an unqualified wilderness. The editors explained their change on the grounds that “a recent act of Congress has once again officially entitled it to the name of Wilderness.” An act of Congress, and, I would argue, a longstanding tradition that wants, even requires, a wild area untouched by human hands at the heart of the White Mountains regardless of obvious evidence to the contrary.
 
What follows are provisional thoughts about what the Pemi has meant to the history of ideas about the White Mountains. Please feel free to comment, criticize, refine, refute. I haven’t decided whether I’m being too hard on J. E. Henry, demonizing him excessively. After all, we walk on some trails in the Pemi courtesy of his EB&L logging railroad.

I don't think you've been unnecessarily harsh. And the fact that old railbeds/roads are now used as hiking trails simply points out that given enough time, the Earth heals itself. To tack the term "Wilderness" at this point is legalistic, and some might say Orwellian.

The need to create/re-create wilderness in central and northern NH in the minds of some might be more due to commercial interests than anything else. After all, if you're trying to get people to recreate in the mountains of NH by "getting away from it all", inventing an image that where you're about to vacation is very different than southern New England. It's convenient to overlook the fact that the mountains have been stripped bare of trees more than once, that there were roads and railroads, and camps and small towns which have been reclaimed by forests.

Re-writing history is a common human trait. In regards to the Pemi it would more honest intellectually to regard it as "reclaiming greenspaces" than "preserving wilderness".
 
Good stuff...

...please keep it coming Waumbek. I love reading historical info about areas in which I have hiked and skied and the Pemi is particularly intriguing. Any info to share on lost logging camps and their locations?
 
Excellent information. I went back and looked at the 1922 edition of the WMG and the opening paragraph for the 'Mt. Carrigain Region' chapter (page 276) states:

"In the A.M.C. Guide of 1907 it was stated that the region about the headwaters of the East Branch of the Pemigewasset contained one of the largest tracts of virgin forest in New England. Since that date most of this fine timber has fallen before the lumberman and the last remaining stand of any considerable size, that on the North Fork, is in process of destruction. Accordingly, while the following descriptions are based on the latest information in the hands of the writers, it is impossible to speak with certainty, since lumbering causes such rapid changes in conditions."
 
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From 1969 to 1983, the WMG reverted to its ambivalent stance about the wild Pemi, placing the word “Wilderness” in the rubric “Pemigewasset Wilderness” in quotation marks. But the older romantic view prevailed again in 1987; the quotation marks were removed. The Pemi was once more imaged as an unqualified wilderness. The editors explained their change on the grounds that “a recent act of Congress has once again officially entitled it to the name of Wilderness.”
I am far less cynical about this than you are, although perhaps the punctuation should have been different. There was an area that was routinely called the "Pemigewasset Wilderness" for historical reasons locally but that term might confuse outsiders who after the mid-60s might expect it to mean an increasingly-common designated Wilderness. So the title was __P "W"__ when it might better have been __"P W"__ Once much of it was designated, the quotes weren't necessary and were removed.
 
Excellent information. I went back and looked at the 1922 edition of the WMG and the opening paragraph for the 'Mt. Carrigain Region' chapter (page 276) states:

"In the A.M.C. Guide of 1907 it was stated that the region about the headwaters of teh East Branch of teh Pemigewasset contained one of the largest tracts of virgin forest in New England. Since that date most of this fine timber has fallen before the lumberman and the last remaining stand of any considerable size, that on the North Fork, is in process of destruction. Accordingly, while the following descriptions are based on the latest information in the hands of the writers, it is impossible to speak with certainty, since lumbering causes such rapid changes in conditions."

Interesting. I should also be looking at Carrigain descriptions along with those of the Pemi. Thanks.
 
... To tack the term "Wilderness" at this point is legalistic, and some might say Orwellian. ... Re-writing history is a common human trait. In regards to the Pemi it would more honest intellectually to regard it as "reclaiming greenspaces" than "preserving wilderness".
So true, but if this were the most Orwellian nightmare we are feverishly rushing towards I'd be willing to live with it.

We are not the ones "reclaiming greenspaces", mother nature accomplishes that quite well all by herself once we butt out.
 
There's a good book "Logging RR of the WMs" by c. Francis Belcher It talks about the East Branch & Lincoln RR, The Sawyer River RR and The Zealand valley RR among others in the Whites. It has the old route maps, w/camps on them.

There's also a "Historical NH" Vol 48, No 4 Winter '93 that deals with the EB&L RR that has a lot of info on the trestles in the Pemi.

In Belcher book it talks about the high grade construction and Housekeeping on the mainline of the EB&L and is still very evident with drainage ditches that work. There was a Foreman for every 2-4 mile section of the RR who was in charge of the maintenance for that section.

Levi ("Pork Barrel") Dumas was a Self Taught construction foremen and built most of the trestles in the Pemi despite barely being able to read or write.

Seems "Pork Barrel" was more then just a name, more of a description of Mr Dumas who with "his Humpty Dumpty frame and small round feet caused him to fall frequently on the rough and icy terrain."
He "in all likelihood supervised the building of the Black Brook Trestle."
 
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