Mt. Moosilauke (1894) - Forest History - George B. James
". . . Ira Whitcher's rival in adroitness was George B. James, better known under his pseudonyms of the New Hampshire Land Company and the Forest Products Company. Most of the Land Company's operations concerned territory to the east of the Moosilauke region. The tracts rounded up in the west half of the town of Woodstock, including most of the Blue Ridge, were comparatively small change to James, but they were vital enough to earn the Land Company the forbidding sobriquet of "the worst trust in the world" from the Rev. John E. Johnson while he was a resident of the town.
Under the title of "Help for the Hills, The Boa Constrictor of the White Mountains," Johnson, who was later a great benefactor of the Dartmouth Outing Club in the development of its mountain recreation program, in 1900 published a diatribe against the Land Company which secured the whole hearted support of the townspeople. The wrath of the inhabitants was stirred not only by the pending destruction of the forest resource but by the conviction that some of them had been euchred out of their lands.
The New Hampshire Land Company was organized in 1880. By 1890 James had secured some sort of title to all the Woodstock land lying both west and north of the Blue Ridge, for in August of that year it was deeded to the Fall Mountain Paper Company. Covered by the deed was a large tract running north from the summit of Mt. Jim and east of the town line which included the Beaver Meadow country; most of this northerly tract was incorporated in its Wild Ammonoosuc unit by the paper company. In February, 1898, the Fall Mountain Paper Company was merged with the International Paper Company. The Jobildunc tract, separated from the Park holdings by the town line, was not logged until the Champlain Realty Company, an operating subsidiary of the International Paper Company, went in some years later. After 1890 James continued the acquisition of lot titles on the east flank of the Blue Ridge. In 1905 he deeded the entire tract for which he had managed to obtain any form of title to the Publishers Paper Company.
Working for James as land agent was a certain Oren James (not related), whose job was to bring in the lots by "hook or crook," and it would seem that full use was made of both methods. The New Hampshire Land Company's formal embrace of a lot to which the claims of others were vague consisted of running and blazing a line around it, thus establishing a sort of ownership by possession. Alaric Demeritt, an old local surveyor, ran lines for the Land Company with a remarkable staff compass which had a tendency to deflect around a good clump of spruce but always ended up on the corner. Mr. George Gordon, owner of the last water powered mill to turn below Lost River, told the writer that A.E. Hoxie, in surveying the land about to be acquired for the National Forest, found the corners to be satisfactory but the lines afflicted with kinks and bulges. Such reports obviously are intriguing hearsay and fit into the context of low value of timberlands at the time to which they refer. . . ."
From the "Forest History of Mount Moosilauke" by J. Willcox Brown, pp.135-162, The Moosilaukee Reader (Vol.1). ©1999.
