September 22, 2008
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Lombard Log Hauler
By Ralph B. Hilton
I will start this chapter by telling about Log Haulers. I never saw but one in my life and that was at a camp up at Deadwater Station on Austin Stream, seven miles above Bingham. Will Robinson of Bingham was the man that owned the Lombard Log Hauler. He was a brother to Olon, Robie, Walter and there were others that I didn’t know. There were fourteen children in the Robinson family. I think Will was third or fourth, Olon told he was the thirteenth. He said, whenever he got hurt he laid his misfortune to being the thirteenth member of the family.
The first time I ever heard of, Will Robinson was about 1920 he was driving a new Nash automobile; it was smeared with all over with mud. It was covered with signs that read this is one of those Nash lemons built for style instead of service. He drove it all over Somerset County. I saw him with it in Skowhegan. It appeared that he didn’t get very good service on his new Nash and was dissatisfied.The Nash Company got wind of what he was doing and tried to get him to take it off the road, which he refused to do. I don’t know whether he got anything or not. Some say he got a new car.
The next I heard of Will Robinson was in 1926. He had a Lombard Log Hauler for three or four years. Then when his son Rodney became of age he got one for him to drive. Will was hauling hardwood logs at Carrabasset for the Atlas Plywood Company. They had a plywood mill at Carrabasset. Carrabasset was on the narrow gage railroad. Which went from Biglow Station, known now as Sugarloaf Ski Resort, to Farmington, though Kingfield.
In the early thirties not much was heard of Will Robinson. The plywood mill was gone. In 1936 he appeared on the scene at Deadwater with one Lombard. He hauled probable two million feet of full-length spruce logs. He landed them to Deadwater Station at a sawmill owned by the Augusta Lumber Company. It would have been impossible to haul those logs over that road with horses. In the first place it was too long a road, at least five miles, and there was a gulch to cross that horses couldn’t have hauled much of a load up out of this gulch. Will hauled a train of 4 or 5 sleds. When he was going up hill his train was so long that his hind sleds were going down hill and they would push the front sleds up the rise. His sleds had 7-foot rockers and they were loaded to a peak probably 4 thousand to a sled, and he made four trips a day.
There was a lot more to the operation. It took a crew of 35 men to keep the sleds loaded. They pulled the loaded sleds out onto the main road, with some small tractors, where they were coupled together. Sometimes it took two small tractors to bring out a single sled. All Will had to do was to back up and hook on to the front sled and away he would go. When he got to the mill all he and his crew had to do was pull a pin. They had a pair of horses at the mill to turn the sleds one at a time and couple them so all Will had to do was back up and one of his helpers would put in the clevis pin and off again he was to the woods. He had two helpers one rode in the cab next to Will so as to warn him if anything was going wrong. The other man rode the middle sled so he could watch the hind end of the train. It took three trains of sleds one in the woods being loaded, one at the landing being unloaded and one on the road.
I would hear the log hauler going through the camp yard while we were eating supper and it seemed as though it would rattle the dishes right off the table. We were hauling with horses at the lower end of the road. There were turnouts we could get out into if we could hear or see the log hauler coming in time. A Frenchman and I were coming back from the landing with our teams. The log hauler was due any minute. We were waiting at a turn out; the Frenchman was telling me about the narrow escape that he had one day. It appeared that he didn’t hear or see the log hauler until it was pretty close and he couldn’t get out of the road. Will put on his brakes; but the lags would not hold. They slid on the ice. I guess the log hauler was pretty close to the horses when it came to a stop. The Frenchman told me, “Robinson stick his head out and laughed and said ‘I think I have meat horse for dinner time’” The Frenchman said, “By Chris I was mad.”
One time I met Will coming back empty, I was going down with a load. Will put the machine out as far as he could and I tried to go by but his hind sled was still in the road. Will asked if I could go by and I said no not yet. He backed up a few feet and swung the front end out and started ahead again taking down a fir tree at least 3 inches in diameter.
Instead of guy chains, these sleds were hocked together with yellow birch reach poles, about 3 inches in diameter with irons on both ends. However, they crossed between the sleds like guy chains. They would wagon around the road corners the same as wagon sleds.Will had a team of his own at the landing to turn the sleds, a gray horse and a black one. I had a strawberry roan and a gray horse. Will stopped one day and asked if I would swap my roan for his gray. Then he says you would have a matched pair. Both gray horses were inferior to the roan of mine and the black one of his. I said, “I don’t think so” he laughed and started off.
When the Augusta Lumber Company tried to hire Will in the fall with his loghauler he didn’t want to go. He said his machine was old and he was afraid he might have some expensive repair bills. They told him that they would pay for all his repairs, all his gasoline oil and grease, and pay him $20 a day. When he finished the job he drove the old Lombard loghauler out behind his house and never ran it afterwards. A few years later he sold it for junk.
In Belle Spaulding Nye’s book she writes about Will Robinson. Will was Belle’s brother-in-law. Belle says a driving crew up around Moosehead got short on flour. They found some over at another driving camp. They went over to get it in a bateaux. The river was full of logs so they couldn’t get very near the camp. When they got the flour down to the floating logs they didn’t know what to do with it. Will Robinson was in the crew and he said, "by cracky let me have it." He put the barrel of flour on his shoulder and started across the floating logs towards the bateaux. It’s a good story anyway.
Will’s wife was a Spaulding; she had three brothers all tough men. Men that drank and when drinking could be quite belligerent. Clint Watson knew them all and he told me that Will Robinson was one man that the Spauldings always steered away from. Right after Will left the Lombard behind his house he went to work for the Central Maine Power Company on a dam they were rebuilding in Solon. About this time Will built a row of one-room cabins behind his house there might have been a dozen of them. He rented them for $1.25 a week. It was said that he went around every Sunday morning and collected.
