RANGELEY - This summer, the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum inducted a father and son team into the Loggers Hall of Fame: Mr. Clement Field (posthumously) and Mr. Bud Field of Rangeley.

Begun in 1985, the museum’s Loggers Hall of Fame honors people who have worked in the woods for a significant part of their lives and who have made valuable contributions to lumbering in the western Maine mountains. “It’s one of the most important things we do,” said museum president and retired logger Rodney Richard, Sr. Clem and Bud Field join a distinguished list of local woodsmen that, since 2004, includes Clarence Jones, William Coolong, Cary Keep, Stan Bartash, Raymond Vallee, Edwin Lowell, and Lewis Abbott.

Over the years, there have many changes in the woods.

“D.C. Morton and I, were some of the old-time loggers. We used the birch hook, and cant dogs, and chainsaws. Today, their machines are like lawnmowers. They call them a harvester, and what they do is cut down the trees. Then they limb them by machine, haul them with the machine, load them with the machine, and unload with the machine. So a truck driver doesn’t touch a log any more, evidently,” Field said with a laugh, adding, “We did all of that by hand.”

Field started working in the woods the summer of 1942, after he graduated from Rangeley School. “I drove gravel truck,” he remembered, “and for two years, we built the road through from Little Kennebago Lake to Coburn Gore. Right across country. We would haul gravel in the summer time—Morton had four trucks that he could put gravel bodies on. And in the winter, we put stake bodies on them and hauled pulp.”

During those years, he and a fellow worker lived in a tent in the summer time and camped on the side of Kennebago Lake. They ate in woods camp cookhouses.

“In those days, they fed pretty good too,” Field remembered. “They had everything. Steak! They went a lot for sweet stuff, too. Cookies. Doughnuts. We had one cook─old “Gramp” Fraser up at Crowley Brook─used to make raisin pies. He was quite an old man. Nice guy. Later, when we hauled right by his cookhouse, he invited us to stop anytime, have a piece of pie.”

Field also helped build the road from Abbott Brook to Parmacheenee, as well as the Lincoln Pond Road that ran across Magalloway all the way to Eustis. After the roads were built, he hauled logs on them, south to Berlin and north to Coburn Gore and Lac Megantic.

“One winter,” he said, “I hauled a load to Lake Megantic and just dumped them on the lake. And I didn’t quit til the water started coming on top of the ice in the spring.”

For a year or so, he operated a bulldozer at Coburn Gore and built woods roads there for summer time roads. Then, he worked as a timber cruiser for several years. “It’s a job you can like a lot,” he recalled. “You do an awful lot of walking. And in the winter time, it’s on a pair of snowshoes. Oh, yeah,” he said smiling, “I did that summer and winter for three years. I wore out two pair of snowshoes.” His job was to walk the Brown Company land and see if there was enough wood to start cutting. “In there, it was mostly spruce and fir. And down on the lower end, there was a lot of hardwood. We cut everything, anything that was due to be cut. What we went for was pulp that was at least seven or eight inches on the butt. And the hardwood had to be at least 12 inches and up. Nothing smaller than that. You couldn’t even haul a piece of wood into the mill that was less than six inches, and, here, all that wood’s going through now is about four inches!”

“Yeah, it was a different time,” Mr. Field commented. “I hauled logs into Canada, pulped every mill in the state of Maine. And then, we went to a trailer, and I think I hauled probably the first load of pulp that went out of Rangeley on a trailer. No one ever believed you could haul a trailer round this country. Well, you’ve got 35 feet beyond you and you don’t have the traction with a tractor and trailer that you have with a straight rig. Yeah, those trailers move around a little bit,” he laughed. “Well, in those days they didn’t sand like they do now, so I used a lot of tire chains. You come through here, and you put on tire chains!”

“Now,” he continued, “they’ve got trucks with engines in them that go up these hills like sports cars! We had trucks that some of these hills didn’t want to go over! Especially Ledge Hill on the Canadian road. Steep! It was a short hill, but it was steep. A lot of trucks in this country couldn’t make it. It’s just this side of Chain of Ponds, Route 27. They’ve changed it all over, they’ve rebuilt the road just in the last few years. They changed that whole hill over I guess! I’ve been intending to go up and look at it, but I’ll go with my pickup, not a trailer,” he laughed. “Oh the roads were a lot different than they are now. Now 90 percent of the time, they have these right down to tarred roads. They use more sand and salt and calcium. They put everything on these roads now. But I was running a lot of times on snow and ice. I put on an awful lot of chains.”

“I hauled about everything somewhere or other,” Field said. “I hauled one whole spring to a city in Rhode Island. And, every year, I hauled a load of firewood into Rhode Island for a fellow who used to have a camp down on Dodge Pond. It had to be all two-foot birch. White birch. He wanted it to look nice in his fireplace. And I hauled Christmas trees to New York. I made only one trip, and I never wanted to go again. It was out on Long Island, and that was out of my territory! A country boy should never try it,” he laughed, “though I didn’t have any trouble with it,” he laughed.

Mr. Field interrupted his work in the woods only for World War II. He served first in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and then in Europe with General Patton’s Third Army. A member of the motor vehicle corps, he landed in France about six days after D-Day. After working in the woods for 20 years as a truck driver, timber cruiser, and crane operator, Mr. Field left to work for the Navy at Redington, where he remained for 37 years, until retiring at the age of 81. “Woods work is hard work,” he stressed. “It was then. Now you can sit there and run a crane or shovel pretty easy.”

Of all the aspects of his work in the woods, Mr. Field remembered one with special fondness: “I liked the horses,” he said. On the timber cruising job for D.C. Morton, he also tended to the horses on the weekends when their weekday caretakers had returned home to Canada. Twice a day, Field drove from his home out to the logging camp on Deer Mountain. “I wouldn’t let the horses go without feeding them twice. I wanted to make sure they were taken care of. I just went and cleaned them out, fed them—took an hour for a horse to have his lunch. I watered them, grained them, and made sure they were happy,” he laughed. “We had Prince and Queen. And one was called Bob, short for Bobtail. His tail was short, but he was a big gray horse. 2,000 pounds. They were nice and gentle, and they each had a different temperament. They were different than a machine.”

When the job moved to another site on Deer Mountain, the horses moved too, Field explained. Their hovels could be moved easily by hooking a wrecker to the buildings and taking them to the next site.

Field’s appreciation for horses has been life-long. “I grew up with them,” he exclaimed. His father, Clement always had a pair of horses that he used for work in the woods. “Father did a lot of woods work when I was younger,” Mr. Field said. “He cut wood off Bald Mountain for Bald Mt Camps and the Barker. When I was first out driving truck for D.C. Morton, Father was woods boss. He worked for D.C. about six years or so, and he was a Rangeley Lakes guide.”

In his work, Mr. Field has seen some amazing trees, and a few as wide as he can spread his long arms. His experiences have given him seasoned perspectives on the Maine woods. “One winter,” he recalled, “I helped Lee Davidson cut a spruce that a five-foot crosscut saw just barely went back and forth six or seven inches. That was in on Daddy’s Ridge, in toward Kennebago. I don’t think there’s one like that in the country anymore. If you see a big one go through town now, it’s only a foot thick. You must have seen their clear cuts out through the woods here? I think they’re ridiculous. Why? Now I see trees going through here four inches in diameter. They haven’t started to grow hardly. They’re using them for chips, and they’re not giving the forest a chance to grow in the state of Maine.”

The Rangeley Lakes Logging Museum congratulates Bud Field; his wife Elayne, to whom he has been married for 62 years come this October; and his family. The Loggers Hall of Fame plaque with his and his father’s name on it hangs in the Museum, and the public is invited to view it during Museum hours (Saturdays and Sundays through Labor Day, 11am to 2pm) and during the museum’s open house, Thursday, Sept. 3, from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.