Mt. Moosilauke (1894) - Forest History - G.L. Johnson
". . . G.L. Johnson, from Monroe, N.H., was perhaps the smartest logger ever to set foot on Moosilauke. Esteemed "a shrewd old cuss," he was reputedly "so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew," but his word, once given, could be depended on absolutely. Johnson was the only operator to grasp the idea that the way to skin the spruce off Moosilauke and get rich doing it was to build a sturdy, economical railroad and whisk the timber off in jig time. So he borrowed the necessary capital in the form of rails and rolling stock from the Henrys in Lincoln, built his railroad without more ado, and paid off the whole debt in the first winter by delivering all the logs he cut to the Henrys' mill.
Meanwhile the Johnson P.O. mill was going strong on logs still pouring in from his other cutting operations. Gradually these dwindled down and the Moosilauke job became the all absorbing project for the titan of the east slope. To keep both his Lost River and Johnson mills going full blast, he needed more rolling stock and longer lines. A spur was extended to the base of the cascades in Lost River, and another pushed farther into the Elbow Pond area. Johnson located a Vermonter who already possessed a logging engine. So the firm was expanded to Johnson and Stebbins, proud proprietors of three Shay geared engines and a buzzing spruce empire.
James McGraw was the artful walking boss on whose wiry shoulders rested the responsibility of producing an average of fourteen million feet of logs per year. Bad years and good, "Jakey" McGraw stuck to his schedule, once dropping to a low of six million but wiping out this bad record the next season with a thunderous twenty six million feet. For eleven years McGraw hammered away until, by 1914, there was hardly a spot of virgin spruce left anywhere on that side of the mountain. Out through the old field stands of the abandoned Cilley and Elbow Pond settlements, where the spruce grew so thick "you had to take a candle to see your way through," to the slopes of Mt. Cushman, McGraw pushed Camp 6 as his southern outpost. . . ."
From the "Forest History of Mount Moosilauke" by J. Willcox Brown, pp.135-162, The Moosilaukee Reader (Vol.1). ©1999.
