Mt. Moosilauke (1900) - The Boa Constrictor of the White Mountains
or the WORST "TRUST" IN THE WORLD
An Account of the New Hampshire Land Company, A corporation chartered to depopulate and deforest a section of the White Mountains
By REV. JOHN E. JOHNSON
(Missionary for the Head Waters of the Merrimack)
NORTH WOODSTOCK, N.H.
July 4, 1900
What is it? The New Hampshire Land Company.
Where is it? Up among the granite hills of the state.
What is its object? To deforest and depopulate the region lying around the head waters of the Merrimack river in the heart of the White Mountains. Its history and modus operandi? In the early days of the company it was allowed to acquire for a song all the public lands thereabouts, and later to 'take over' all tax-titles, until finally there was no considerable tracts in that vicinity which it did not own. It is not necessary to explain the process by which, after a long period of dormancy, the stock of the company passed into the hands of one man for next to nothing. This was the first stage of the concern's career.
The next stage was also a process of 'refrigeration,' and is still going on. It consisted of getting rid of the native population, a hardy stock, who had clung to the home wood lots belonging to the rough areas which they called their farms - for they were more lumbermen than agriculaturalists.
These must need be driven out to make way for deforesting operations on a large scale. The method adopted was a very simple one - they were starved out. The company refuses to sell them any land. The farmers, exhausting their limited tracts of woodland and unable to buy more at any price, gradually found themselves without logs for their local mills - and almost every farmer had one.*
Their sons, robbed of their winter employment, took no longer to the woods but to the cities, leaving the old folks to fall slowly but surely into the clutches of the company which took their farms from them or their heirs, in most cases for a dollar or two an acre. This process is now going on and may be seen in all its stages from valleys where it has just begun to those out of which the entire population has been driven. . . ."
*It is related that when the news of Bunker Hill was brought to John Stark, he was in the saw mill on his farm, lower down on the Merrimack where he now lies buried. (Has he turned over in his grave?)
From "The Boa Constrictor of the White Mountains" by John E. Johnson, 1900.
