Claude Dern is a logger who presently owns a logging company, Paul Bunyon Logging, and has been logging since the 1970's. He first was interested in logging in his childhood and turned his dreams into a reality. He started off with a one-man team, soon turning into a full-blown operation with a trucking company to boot.
Ben: How long have you been working the land?
Claude: Well, I grew up in Dorset, back road, what was a typical hill farm at that time and this was in the '40s and '50s and everyone, or certainly the great majority of us had a connection to the land. It was what I guess you would call an agrarian type society I know in high school, probably 50% of the students were involved with cows in one way or another and everyone had pretty much worked in the hay fields and the family farms, everyone in the family was involved with it. Many times, families years ago, were larger, one of the reasons was you needed labor to work on the farm that's where it came from. People worked together, they had to work together. They didn't have many of the amenities that they have today. From Dorset, I remember we'd come to Manchester maybe like once a week. Now, I come twice a day. We'd go to the grocery store, well you didn't go to the grocery store that often, but for some things. Many things were your own, you raised your vegetables, froze them, once electricity had come along and you had freezers. Before that, it was very common to hear people talk about canning; canning their vegetables, canning meats, there was pickling, smoking, all the ways that food could be preserved before the modern way. And another term that was used a lot then was trading. If people'd say "I'm going shopping" they may as well have said, "I'm going to go do my trading." And that trading was you had something whether it be food, beef, peas, some thing that you worked and got that some one else needed to bring wood to the doctor, and then he would have their services whenever he needed them, they did trading, no money changed hands, and it was quite common. People could not have everything, but what they did have and someone else didn't, like people in the village, there was a doctor and a lawyer. There weren't doctors and lawyers, there was only one doctor and one lawyer. Now we're over run with them. There weren't any restaurants to speak of, as we have so many of them now. Now, the transportation is quick and easy, then, when there was mud, it meant exactly that, mud, this deep, virtually impassible. When the snow storms came, the roads were plowed once, at the end of the storm, they also weren't sanded usually. Chains were common. And in the '40s and '50s, most of the farms still had their teams of horses. The horses weren't used as much then, as tractors had come into the scene, but horses were part of the family, so they stayed on in their retirement like, and they'd still pull some horse drawn machinery to get some logs or firewood. But electricity, transportation, and communication all improved. I remember that the first television set, probably in the early '50s, it had maybe an 8 inch screen and was connected through WRTB with a picture like a snow storm, but it was something. Radio, you could listen to the radio a lot, the Lone Ranger would be on. For social events, there was the Saturday night dance usually, you didn't have the entertainment that you have today, I mean, it's not uncommon here to drive 30-40 miles or more to attend some show or program. Locally, in the winter time, there were sledding parties. They'd build a bon fire and rude on old car hoods or a piece of cardboard, whatever you had; it was makeshift. You didn't have a lot of the modern contraptions, you made do with what you had where you were. A lot of people were virtually self sufficient. It comes to mind three people that lived at the end of my road, a dead end road, and they lived all independently of each other. They had some traits as everyone does and I'm so glad to have lived and witnessed this, those things are almost gone today. So, the first fellow, lived in a little shack you could call it, it was probably about 12 feet square, with tar paper on the sides, the over hang on the roof was rather extreme, kind of a slightly sloping shed roof and the overhang was probably 2-3 feet, he had little shelves. On those shelves were tobacco cans and jars. He collected every possible thing. He'd have nuts and bolts, he'd spend time straightening nails. People didn't have a lot of money and this was something that he could do. Many times, a farmer would send me up there if something broke because we didn’t have a local hardware store. They’d say ‘go up and see if Henry’s got a bolt.’ So he’d go and poke through his stuff and usually he had wht you needed. He had a little garden, he grew an amazing amount of vegetables. A grat garden, he wasn’t able to do hard, physical work, but he could tend to his garden. He had a gas engine, high steel wheels, tractor, and that’s what he would cultivate with. In his little shack there, he had a bunk bed, there wasn’t much room. On the other wall was a kerosene stove, it was very common for people to have kerosene staves, little round things, and he had his on some wheels. He was always tinkering, like inventing things and making life easier for him. He had it rigged up with some pulleys and a rope so he didn’t have to get up in the morning to light his stove. He’d pull his stove over to him, light it, and then pullit back across the room. Then when it came time to eat something, he had a hole in the floor, and down there was a crock in which he kept pickled meat and vegetables, whatever he happened to catch or someone broughtto him. Before there was electricity, no refridgeration, so he’d have a big fork and he’d reach down and pullit up and he’d say ‘hmm... we’re gonna have rabbit for the next couple days.’ or squirrel or whatever he happened to fish out of his crock, salt pork was probably in another crock, pickles and things I’m sure he canned and he had those things. He read a lot, I can remember we used to take our newspapers and magazines up to these people. The next fellow farther up the road lived in, what in the day had been quite the spectacular house, but it was quite dilapidated. That fellow had never gone too far in school because he had a speech impediment. At that time, that was looked upon differently, there were no special ed programs to tend to it so he was, kinda always stayed by himself, but he was certainly intelligent. He knew money, and he could go and do his trading. He would get his horse and wagon and some wood, he’d go down to the village and then, if he had money enough, he’d get a bottle of beer. He’d drink it on the way home and he wouldn’t want to carry it back up the hill, so he’d leave his empty bottles at th ebase of the telephone pole. Then they had another device, which was a labor saver. They had the hay loader and that would be on the hay wagon and it was a whole network of metal tines. And the hay would be raked into windrows, probably by the old-fashioned dump rakes. Someone would ride it and you would come along and be catching up some hay you got the right spot you’d step on the pedal and you would dump it so you would have a whole line of hay. And the hay loader would drive over the top of that and the hay would be held onto the metal fingers and would bring it up over and place it on the back of the wagon and then someone on the wagon would place it. When it came time to get to the barn with the load, it had to be unloaded and that would be quite a job and plus you had piles of hay 20 feet high inside the barn. This was accomplished with what was known as a horse-fork and it was a metal fork like there were two vertical tines about three feet long and someone would take that, hopefully someone who weighed a little more than someone else and they would actually jump on that and force it down into the hay. Then you could set these teeth, there was a tooth on the bottom of each tine, probably four inches long or so, and they would come in horizontally and lock the hay in there so it wouldn’t bite back off. Then with a network of ropes and pulleys it would pull the hay off of the wagon ‘til it got up in the peak of the barn on a track and then it would pull it off to the side and there was a rope hooked to a release mechanism. You would pull it and those teeth would go the other way and the hay would fall away. So, that was pulled up by a horse many times on the end of the rope, but then the tractor came around and the implements that were pulled the corn harvester, if you want to call it that, would cut one row at a time and it would bundle up about 10 or 12 stalks and tie a little string around it and that would fall onto the ground. Then you would load that onto a wagon, by hand, and many times you loaded it all from one side because that’s the way you needed to unload it when you got to the silo and this would end up making the load all pitched sideways and if you weren’t real careful with it, it would come sliding off and everything else. But why it was heading one way was cause when you got to the barn and now everything is done with what is called a field chopper, the corn is actually chopped in the field, this was chopped at the silo and a device that had a conveyer and you would set a bundle of corn in there. It went in through to these knives, this was a belt driven machine, and it chopped the corn up, at the same time it had enough air in a blower and it blew it up the pipe and into the silo. So you’d have to feed this in, stagger it just right and if you got too much in there you could run the belt out. If you did that it would plug the pipe and you’d have to tear it all down or dig it all out, which was quite a performance. So then they came along with the hay baler. The first one I remember I think it was ’53 or ’54 and that was a great laborsaving device. It had its own gas engine on it. Most of them don’t now today, there was a PTO shaft, a power take-off, and that was a great labor saver and then you used either an elevator or just threw the bales of hay in and then stacked them. You could put a lot more hay in a smaller area. Well, then with the corn it started chopping that with the field choppers and the first ones I remember those they were power tank equipped and they were tire A, which seemed like a big tractor to me. It only had, I think, about 36 horsepower. It wasn’t enough to run those field choppers, it could just barely go on its lowest gear. Some times you would have to stop and let it rev back up. So they built bigger tractors and the tractors today, many of them are horsepower hydraulics plus today we used to pull some stuff really amazing Families had children grow-up, get married are still stay and work, work on the farm, but today to have four or five times the number of cattle and everything it only takes a couple people to run it so there isn’t room for all the rest of the family to stay on the family farm and that’s part of the start of the demise of it but our land here in southern Vermont, especially the hill farms with their rock outcrops and the small size meadows and things some of the equipment today is so big you can hardly turn it around in what we thought was a good sized field at the time. Many of these fields were an acre, two acres or something and you see what’s up and down the valleys, the Pawlet Valley especially, they’re 20, 30 or 40 acre fields and some of them you can go by them in the morning and its not plowed or anything, you come back in the evening and its been all plowed and planted. That would have been a two or three week undertaking usually, and now its just a matter of hours and its all done. When the barn cleaners first came out I remember we spent hours shoveling manure into manure spreaders. You could back in behind the cows and load it on one part of the barn, on the other part there wasn’t enough room to do that, you’d load it in the wheelbarrow and you push it up a plank and dump it in the manure spreader. That is unless it got to be too slippery there was snow or the manure would slop out and then it might tip over on you or something, so it was a chore. Milking with the vacuum systems and you’d dump the milk and carry it out to the milk house, put it through a strainer and it went into a milk can and these did not have refrigeration by electricity so you had usually a cold water pipe from a spring that was piped into the milk trough and the cans were kept in that cold water and every day you, at some point, a milk truck would pick up the cans. Well, on the farms, they wouldn’t come up the back roads, so you had to take ‘em by a certain time or you would miss the milk truck and take ‘em down and put ‘em on the milk stand which was up at the level of the truck that was picking ‘em up because that’s a 40 quart can and full weighs about pounds, so you didn’t want to take them from the ground and put ‘em on the bed of the truck. So we’d take ‘em down with a pick-up truck which you’d pull them out of the cold water tank, put ‘em in the pick-up and the bottom of the pick-up’s here and the milk stand is here so you had to raise it up two or three feet and get it on there and then with electricity and modernization came the bulk tanks, where the milk was all kept in an electrically cooled thing. There was a paddle there to stir it up, but then it had to be picked up by a truck that was specially equipped to do that and some of these back roads weren’t too well suited for a larger truck especially in the winter time and things and the expense of the bulk tank and so the farms started dwindling and they couldn’t buy your milk anymore in a can. You had to upgrade or get out. So that’s when the farms started getting fewer farms, but the best farms and the best land started getting bigger and more cattle, more land, maybe they needed to own more land, but they operated more land because the other farms were going and the families started to change. There wasn’t the need for the children on the farm. They had other interests in education and many of them exodus from here that there was better living think to be made other parts of the country and there wasn’t a lot going on here. At that time we didn’t have manufacturing there was very, very few, such as a local sawmill and things like that but there wasn’t a lot for so there was a big change as times are always changing but the… Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s was so different than today. The back roads, they’d get graded maybe once a year after mud season to smooth ‘em back up and they weren’t traveled enough for what a strip of grass usually grew out of the center of the road in the summer time. The mail, mailman would come, I remember in the wintertime. He had an old Model T care on he’d put chains on it and he would back up the hill and I think the reason for that is if he didn’t make it, he stood a lot better chance by not going out of control by backing down front wards but the mail got delivered. Had telephone service which went to the switchboard in the town and a person did just that. They’d had your cord for your phone, which was usually a party line and on the back road maybe everybody on the same road had the party line. So when you picked up, and you heard somebody talking you’d have to wait until they were through or else break-in if it was more important or you could have a nice conference call. And at the switchboard you’d give the phone number that you’d . Our phone number at one time was 30 and the neighbor was 155JK. And the switchboard was right next to the general store in the center of Dorset and I can remember sometimes picking up the phone and the operator’s there and I’d say, “Can you see, is my mother at the store?”, everybody knew who’s vehicle was who’s, “And if so then can you call the store and say ‘Can you bring this home?’” So it was convenient compared to some things today. The road I live on now, Danby Mountain Road, that’s all electricity in 1948 and the farmer up there at the time he purchased a chest type freezer and it was more like one of the ice cream freezers, it had two little doors on the top. I believe it was an International brand and he passed on eight years ago or so, and as far as I know, that freezer is still worked, it may have had some repairs done, but it had been in use all those years. Before the electricity up there, for lighting he made carbide gas that had a metal tank in the ground and you would get a bag of carbide and mix it with water and it made a flammable gas and that was piped to the barn, to his house, and to his mother’s house and that was for their lighting. Other than that most people just had the kerosene lamps in the house and the lanterns to carry around. And they spent many, many hours of feeding animals, caring for animals, and physically lugging and tugging on the silos, you’d climb up into the silos, throw the chop corn down and load it into a basket, carry it around the barn, dump it in front of the cow. The manure, shovel that all by hand. Everything was done by hand. There weren’t mechanical devices and today. Its pretty much push-button much of it. These feed carts, silo un-loaders automatically fill the feed cart somebody can stand on that. This is battery operated and push button to unload what you need to do. It’s something. The milking machines you used to carry ‘em around to each cow. Now there’s milking parlors and the cows come to the milking parlors and also its up at a raised elevation so you can work here rather than being squatting down on the ground all the time. Just things are so, so much easier. No matter how much you try to explain how things were done, unless you actually were there and lived it, you can’t appreciate it. You can’t go to a recreational farm and spend a week. Its not like it was living year after year and things. Like being up a two or three in the morning and helping a cow have a calf that when the head wasn’t positioned right, one leg was one way and one the other and you had to rearrange things and then help pull and eventually the calf came out. You had medical emergencies, you didn’t have a veterinarian come all the times, there were special devices to give a cow’s pills. There’d be huge, huge pills and had this thing you had to get their mouth up and get it down their throat enough so they’d swallow. Cow’s horns usually were cut off. There was a, like a big pair of brush cutters, but that was gear driven so it had a lot of mechanical advantage. They’d hold the cow by the nose and actually cut the horn up, well then there was quite a lot of bleeding from a little artery there, and that gets tied off and there’s a special, not really painful, to them cow but the cow doesn’t cooperate either. Those things no I think they’re burned off when they’re young. So just so many things that have changed. So, are you thinking of farming?
BT- No. You’re a logger right now, presently?
CD- Yes.
BT- How long have you been doing this?