MAINE TALES. ‘THE ASH HOOP BANK.’ Bridgewater, Maine. Circa 1979.
Yes, sir! That’s gonna be a problem. No hoops, no barrels. Seems now in hindsight like it should have been predictable.
It was after World War II when Roy Wheeler started up the Barrel Mill in Bridgewater. During the war, the nearby Presque Isle Army Airfield was the closest base to Europe on American soil. It was used by the Air Transport Command as a major ‘North Atlantic Transport Route’ to ferry equipment across to Great Britain.
The Base closed after the war and Roy was able to secure some obsolete wartime wooden structures for re-purposing. He hauled the modest buildings down to Bridgewater and linking them together he created the barrel mill. In the heavy snow country of Northern Maine one might well have questioned the wisdom of frugal wartime measures aimed at conserving materials. However, the 2”x4” rafters spaced on thirty-inch-centers and the planed 1”x6” stringers miraculously served their purposes for decades, long past what anyone could have imagined reasonable.
At the Barrel Mill the active inventory of Brown Ash hoops (rhymes with “books”) used by the Coopers to make Potato barrels were stowed in a water-filled concrete-walled vat. Two-by-fours wedged against the ceiling were pounded into place to force the float-minded hoops to remain submerged in the swampy water. Once soaked long enough to become pliable, a Cooper would retrieve a bundle of fifty hand-shaved hoops which had been bundled with sisal baling twine. A homemade electric-powered “Hoop Bender” machine had been fabricated out of wood using a ten-inch flat-belt which snaked around three vertically-mounted pulleys. A Cooper would insert two or three soaked hoops at a time into the gap at the top of the middle pulley and a second later the hoops would be spit back out by the revolving belt from the bottom of that middle pulley. The Hoop Bender cleverly transformed the hoops from stiff into perfect fully pliable bands.
An enormous inventory of Ash hoops were always stored ahead in a nearby Barrel Mill shed. The Ash hoops themselves were split and hand shaved by independent, skilled members of area Mi’kmaq and Maliseet tribes. First, the workers would head into local swamps and cut down 6 ½-foot poles from Brown Ash trees. The sought after ideal diameter of Ash poles were from trees the diameter of a glass bottle of Coca-Cola. The best hoops came from the bottom tree sections which had thick, soft bark. Enough Ash poles would be cut to fill a car’s trunk and the accumulated weight was such that the car’s rear end sagged considerably under the load.
Once home, the hoop-makers would use metal wedges to split the poles into quarters. Homemade four-legged shaving benches featured a seat to sit down on and a pivoting foot-operated-dog which clamped down the hoop stationary while a sharp drawknife was used to carefully shave down and finish the hoop. The vast majority of the hoops used by Coopers were expertly and skillfully made.
Occasionally a joker would mix in inferior hoops split from poles located too high in the Ash tree trunk, where the diameter had become too small and the bark was young, smooth and hard. These loser hoops were the bane of the piece-rate Coopers. Either they’d break on a knot in the hoop bender, get mangled in the Cooper’s foot-operated hoop-notch-guillotine, or snap in half when being pounded home on a barrel by a Cooper’s adze and hoop-pounder-tool.
For decades Roy Wheeler had run a profitable Potato Barrel business. In that era, every farmer needed hundreds of barrels in order to plant, harvest and handle a crop of Potatoes. Farmers were of a mind that there were no better Potato Barrels built anywhere in Aroostook County than right here in Bridgewater.
Whenever a hoop-maker brought in his trunk-load of hoops, the terms of the deal were clear: Roy would buy all the hoops, and pay cash then and there. This reliable Ash-hoop-economy had been developed with old-school trust and unwavering reliability to the closely-woven community of hoop-makers. With hoops spilling out from car trunks, the hoop-makers often arrived in jalopies in rough shape, many of them bearing New Brunswick license plates. Broad hints indicated that many of these craftsmen lived on the economic edge. For decades, every hoop-maker far and near knew that if they ever needed to generate a quick couple of hundred bucks, they could earn it in a week of hard work by cutting poles, splitting and shaving hoops and showing up at Roy’s doorstep for an immediate fistful of cash.
By the early 1970s Roy had aged into retirement. The Barrel Mill changed hands a couple of times in this new era. During the 70s, the bigger farmers were shifting over to big machine Potato harvesters and bulk-body Potato trucks. The smaller farmers were getting left behind and ‘getting done’ in that many were dropping out of growing Potatoes entirely. With demand for Potato Barrels declining, the competing barrel mills, one by one, were closing their doors until Bridgewater Barrel was last man standing. Turning a profit in the Potato Barrel business was much harder now. Expenses came under heightened scrutiny.
One fateful day the hoop shed was pretty well-stockpiled with many thousands of hand-shaved Brown Ash hoops. Then, a fateful, unprecedented decision was made by the new owner not to buy any hoops until the inventory had been whittled down. So, in comes a jalopy with a trunkful of nice, shaved Ash hoops. The hoop-maker is told Bridgewater Barrel has plenty of hoops right now and is not buying. There was stunned silence and disappointment. Essentially, the ‘Ash Hoop Bank’ was on Bank Holiday and closed for business.
Word about the closure spread like wild fire through the community of hoop-makers on both sides of the border. When the shaved Ash hoop inventory was sufficiently depleted, the word was put out that Bridgewater Barrel was again buying Ash hoops. However, the system had been broken. Essentially, no one ever showed up again to sell hand-shaved Ash hoops.
Facing an existential barrel crisis, Percy Milbury, the Barrel Mill’s Canadian millright rigged up machines to saw out and roll hoops made from Elm (“L-Umm”) planks. These sawn Elm hoops worked OK if they were made from clear wood, free of knots. However, Dutch Elm Disease was raging and the area’s Elm trees were dying. So this lumber supply was endangered and disappearing fast. Sawn White Oak hoops were tried and while they looked pretty they were weak and brittle for the rugged and unyielding mistreatment of Potato barrels in a Potato field. Sawn White Ash hoops fared a little bit better, but the fact was well-known, no sawn hoop ever possessed the strength and durability of hand-shaved Brown Ash hoops.
In more ways than one, this shaved Ash hoop saga symbolized the end of the Potato barrel era and sped along the transition to the new idea of constructing and marketing novelty barrels for retail trade displays.
So, lesson learned. Think before you leap. Upsetting a community tradition may come at great cost.
Jim
