Yackman’s Comments: This is a first person account of a trip on a huge log raft on the St. Lawrence River, from Hamilton Island to Montreal during the summer of 1895, one hundred-fifteen years ago.  The author is the grandfather of a friend of mine, Bill Barrows.  This account was passed on by Bill and his wife Carol. 

Bill’s grandpa was about twenty years old in 1895, having been born only a decade after the end of the Civil War.  He had just graduated from St. Lawrence University and was vacationing with friends when a huge log raft carrying wood to Quebec, and from there to Europe, happened by.  The narrative that follows was written for a presentation at a Kiwanis Club some forty-eight years later, in 1943 (the year of my birth).  What triggered the author’s memories was a family steamship trip over that same water.  The story that follows will mention familiar places for those of us who have vacationed and paddled on the St. Lawrence and Saguenay Rivers.  But it will also inform us of a life and time long gone when our country was barely 100 years old and the St. Lawrence was still part of the frontier.  The photos are copies of originals taken by the author in 1895.

A RAFTING EXPERIENCE ON THE ST. LAWRENCE 1895

By E.R. Barrows

I have had so much pleasure since Labor Day re-living an experience of many years ago that I am going to try to interest you in its recital.  This pleasure developed on what is known as the Saguenay Trip of the Canadian Steam Ship Lines down the St. Lawrence, beyond Quebec and up the Saguenay River.  Please note that I said down the St. Lawrence.  Because on the map the river has a N.E. direction very many people speak of going up the St. Lawrence.  But like all rivers that I know the water runs down hill and the fall is about 240’ from Lake Ontario to the ocean.

My home was originally in N, N.Y. and the St. Lawrence had a grandeur that fascinated me.  True, in comparison with the Ohio, the water seems colorless and insipid, lacking that rich golden brown.  Nor does it have the substance and thick consistency of the Ohio

I attended a little college in Canton, N.Y. known as St. Lawrence University.  A classmate of mine locating later in Brooklyn met a N.Y. lady at a banquet one evening who wanted to know where he was from.  When he said he was from St. Lawrence she exclaimed, “St. Lawrence – Oh yes, I know.  Our Sunday School class is raising money to send a missionary up there”.  Maybe missionaries were needed there but that country boasts of Frederick Remington, the artist, Addison Irving Bachelor, the writer of Eben Holden and other books, life saver Nobel who just paid 8 millions for the Blue Network and Owen D. Young.  I am from there also.

In the summer of 1895 I rode a bicycle from Canton to Cornwall Ont. 60 miles, crossing at Waddington to visit friends named Kinsley in a camp on Hamilton Island.  One evening an immense timber raft came along on its way to Quebec, then England.  Some of us rowed out to look it over and the pilot asked if we cared to ride to Montreal with him.  Four of us hurriedly accepted and it was this experience that I have been reliving.  I was then getting interested in photography and had a camera with which I took the pictures I have here.  They were on glass plates and are still in fair condition, although like some of us, they are getting a little gray around the edges.

The raft had five sections or drams of pine and one of oak.  Each dram was 62’ wide by 300’ long and when assembled into a raft made a floating island 124’ by 900’ with an area of 2.6 acres.  While not positive about the value then, my memory is that it was half a million dollars.

It was handled by a side wheeled tugboat named Hiram A. Calvin. The Hi-ram' as pronounced by the French Canadians.  The first night out we were awakened by cries of "the Hi-ram is afire" only it was in French and we didn’t know what it was all about until we got out to look. Nothing serious and we proceeded. The officers with their private cook had a board shack with bunks forward while the craw lived in a tent in the stern. 

At the head of each rapid they would take on about 100 extras to break the raft into six drams and man the long oars to steer the drams through the rapids!  Each dram had its pilot and from fifteen to twenty oarsmen. The pictures show the oarsmen and long oars.

The rapid water starts just below Prescott with the Galop and DuPlat rapids but they are insignificant compared with the Long Sioux 9 miles long that follows. The Long Sioux ends above Cornwall so we did not get to run them on the raft. Our first was a set of three, the Coteau, Cascades and Cedars and all run by the same crew. One dram got hung up on a shoal in the Cascades and we got a ride back through the canal on the tug boat that had to go back to pull it off the shoal. That gave us the ride through this set a second time and on the tug. I still vividly remember that night ride through the canal. Many of the French-Canadians and Indians that had worked going down took advantage of the return trip to get home and there was hardly standing room. It was a hot rainy night and they were sleeping everywhere.  I had a top bunk in the hold for a time but the deck leaked and finally I changed to a chair in the engine room for the rest of the night. A big power dam has now eliminated these three rapids from navigation and boats use the Soulange Canal.

The Lachine Rapids were the last and we went ashore in Montreal. We were on from a Wed afternoon to Friday afternoon. Our only expense was what we paid the cook for meals.

Now to jump ahead to the Saguenay Trip forty-eight years later. I had been around the 1000 Islands and to Montreal but had never been to Quebec. We thought we would make a vacation trip of it this year if possible but could not get reservations until after Labor Day.

Knowing that we would "Shoot the Rapids" again only on a boat this time I got out my old negatives and fixed up the little album I have here wondering and hoping that I might meet someone that would remember the old rafting days and be interested. The interest far exceeded my expectations. I wish I knew how many saw the pictures. They aroused interest all right. On the Rapids Prince the First Officer said he began work on the rapids 54 years before and that only the week before Mr. Calvin the C.SS Agent at Kingston was making the trip and couldn’t talk about anything else but the rafting days. When he said Calvin I immediately connected the name with the name of our tugboat the Hiram A. Calvin. He told me that he was of the family that had been in the rafting business for years and that I could meet him in Kingston on my return trip. The Purser on our boat introduced me to Mr. Calvin and I handed him the pictures. In surprise and amazement he almost jumped as he exclaimed "where did you get these pictures?" Then “you wait right here” and ran of through the crowd to bring his wife. Starting with his grandfather in 1826 the Calvin family had conducted this business until it expired in 1914 from timber exhaustion.

I offered to make a set of the pictures for him and did so with the request that he write me a brief sketch of the rafting business.

I wanted his sketch to accompany a set of the pictures for a rather unique Museum that a Richard Ellsworth now a retired Ex-Secy of S. L. U. has been collecting for years. It is a very remarkable and interesting collection of a great variety of things, pictures, antiques, historical records etc in connection with northern N.Y.

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