Editor’s Note: This bit of Caribou history was compiled by Wendy Bossie, retired archive librarian at the Caribou Public Library. It’s Caribou’s birthday — Be a part of it.
Rolling the roads in winter
As we celebrate the 150th birthday of Caribou, we are reminded that the well-plowed roads we enjoy today were not always the norm. During the winter years until the early 1930s the roads were not plowed so automobiles had to be stored for the winter. The roads were rolled and the snow kept hard and a track made in which the horse drawn sleds and sleighs traveled.
Ralph Hitchings describes how this was done. “The big town roller was a huge heavy wooden machine, made up of two rollers, end to end, about six feet in diameter and each about six feet long. Will Grey, the road commissioner, would hook up three and sometimes four teams in tandem, onto the big town roller and pull it over the roads to compact the snow. The big, heavy hardwood planks looked to be four inches thick and eight inches wide. It was a sight to behold; six horses pulling this big roller with Will Grey perched way up top in the center holding the reins.”
Plows were used in the spring when the snow began to melt. George Whitneck wrote, “ The roller was an improvement over the snowplow. It kept the roads smooth and hard. The snow drifted over the road and there weren’t any large banks of snow on each side of the road. The roller was wide. It packed the snow on each side of the road too. Now a team could turn out any place without getting a horse down belly-deep in the snow.”
Winter Carnival — Lombard Log Hauler
As we celebrate the 150th birthday of Caribou, we are reminded of winter carnivals in the past and especially the carnival of 1948 when the main attraction was the Lombard log hauler owned by John Cormier of Portage Lake.
Norman C. Lynch wrote the following account in the Aroostook Republican for January 22, 1948. “Literally driven from its lair in the deep heart of Maine’s Fish River country by modern lumbering methods and a winter carnival, what is alleged to be the world’s last and only genuine ‘Maine steam log hauler’ will come snorting down the streets of Caribou this Thursday morning, belching steam like the proverbial Chinese Dragon, as it makes its last stand against a changing world.”
The log hauler was invented by A.O. Lombard of Waterville and was used in the 1920s and 1930s to haul logs out of the woods. It had caterpillar tracks in the rear and a miniature one-room cabin on skis in the front. It weighed 28 tons. This particular machine was capable of hauling 24 sleds of lumber and had, in fact, hauled over 800 million feet out of the Fish River district. This log hauler had only one major accident in its work life when it went through the ice into 24 feet of water. It was hauled out and in operation again in less than a day.
The crew that operated the big Lombard around Caribou during the winter carnival included Henry Soucia, conductor, Dr. Byron Porter, assistant, Mack and Hilare Caron as engineers and Perley Daggett as steersman. The woods machine was part of the winter carnival parade and anyone purchasing a ticket to the Sportsmen’s Show was allowed a free ride around the park.
