Before the Black Flies.

Boundary. Bridgewater, Maine. Circa 1910    .

     Many years later in the 1970s, Glen and I worked together at Bridgewater Barrel. I was the most breathless one of four ‘Coopers’ who everyday would each ‘make’ fifty eleven-peck cedar Potato barrels. Glen was one of the ‘Nailers’ who would set barrel cleats into the barrelheads, then pound in nails to secure them. He’d also drive and clinch hoop nails by mounting a barrel onto a cast-iron ‘barrel wheel,’ fashioned from an old flat-belt pulley which protruded sufficiently from the wall on a shaft. Glen would drive a nail through the hand-shaved Brown Ash barrel hoops (rhymes with ‘books’) and sawn staves Coopers had used to ‘make’ their barrels. One nail was needed for each stave for all six ash hoops, sixteen staves per barrel. Ninety-six nails per barrel, not counting the 18 needed for the six barrelhead cleats.

     We all worked piece-rate. As a Nailer, Glen got paid 55 cents per barrel. Coopers got paid 80 cents. In the 1970s, a Cooper making $40 a day was big money in Northern Maine – worth $200/day in 2023 dollars. It took the equivalent of three Nailers to keep up with four Coopers. When they got caught up on odds and ends, Edgar Wheeler and Robbie Brewer, the owners, would come in and help Glen and the other Nailers keep up. Working together we’d build a thousand new barrels every week, ahead of the big seasonal rush for barrels needed by local Potato farmers every Spring.

     Glen had his own distinctive way of launching into a story. Most often, out of the blue he’d get your attention calling out, “…Ya know it, Jim?” Amidst pounding adzes and hammers, as the named designee, my duty was to reply, “What’s that, Glen?” Then he’d dive into a story which most often had something to do with work, consistent with our Potato country’s hard-work-culture. Glen would most generally begin his story with one time worn expression he’d certainly gotten his money’s worth out of. “Well, I wenna work…” [Well, I went to work].

     “Well, I wenna work and laid down on the Chesterfield last night after supper. Then all of a sudden this truck pulls into the drive. I got up and went out to see what the all the commotion was about. Well, it was so and so, and he handed me the $700 he’d owed me for fixing his truck. It’s been five years! I’d given up hope I’d ever see that money.”

     With a wife and daughter, Glen had been a steady working man his entire life. When still a young man he worked in a local sawmill which featured a “gang saw,” which with a single pass of the log-carrying-carriage would simultaneously saw out a half-dozen pieces of lumber at a time. A foolhardy co-worker would habitually negotiate a short cut getting to the far side of the mill. He’d take a treacherous path which included stepping on the log as the carriage propelled the log towards the saw blades. Every last man in that mill quit the day that showoff made a disastrous misstep that ended his life.