Rafting on the Allegany River

RAFTING ON THE ALLEGANY RIVER.

Mrs. Irene Hellwege's first hand tale about Rafting down the Allegheny River in 1869. Mrs. Irene Hellwege of South Union Street was busy making strawberry jam when her neighbors and friends called to congratulate her on the anniversary of her eighty-eight birthday, Friday June 27, 1941. The strawberries, incidentally, were picked by Mrs. Hellwege, who thought nothing of going out in the woods near her home and pick a few quarts a day.

Mrs. Hellwege was born in Allegany on June 27, 1853, and had always resided in this vicinity. During her girlhood, Mrs. Hellwege served as a cook on one of the logging rafts on the Allegany River between Olean and Pittsburgh. That was during the time that lumbermen in this section used rafts as the only means of transporting logs to the mills. She recalled many interesting events when she prepared the meals for the lumber jacks, who sometimes numbered as many as fifty-six.

Compared with the present mode of transportation, Mrs. Hellwege maintained there wasn't the color nor adventure that there was way back when. For instance one time in her logging career, she left Olean on one of the lumber rafts for Louisville, Ky., just a matter of six weeks (she told with a smile.)

I was 26 years old, so far as I can figure-it must have been 62 years ago when I made my first trip down the river as a cook for a gang of loggers. The lumber was sawed and rafted at Vandalia. We started the last of March down the Allegany River, and our pilots were Lee Burr and Tom Scrogg, and several others. There were a few Indians on the rafts, and they were very nice to me; the rest were all white men.

We started out in a fleet of small rafts, which, as the river widened at Warren and Pittsburgh, were buckled together with oak binders, and gradually became one great raft, as all the pieces were coupled up. It was a sight to see them, one raft after another going through the piers of the bridges! Each raft had it oars; until all the rafts were joined there would be long rows of oars. I've seen blister all over the men's hands from paddling with those oars!

The men sold the pieces of lumber from the rafts all along the river: a five platform piece or a ten platform piece, and so the raft would get smaller. One time they sold the platform of the sleeping shanty right up to the step outside my door! I didn't like that one bit, and I told them so. There were two small shanties on the main raft, one for the cooking, and one for the sleeping. When all the lumber was sold, lots of times those men walked all the way home over the mountains from Pittsburgh to save enough money to live on. Wages were six dollars going from Chipmonk down to Warren, but they gave me $3.50 a week.

It took about five days to go to Pittsburgh. We had nine piers, with the lumber deep in the water. Sometimes the shanties would hit the bridges and topple right over when the water was so high. Little places all along the banks of the river were flooded away and the people lost everything. Nothing was left, not even a barn! We would ask someone where a place was, and it would be as bare as your hands. Once we located a cow that had floated in a barn miles and miles down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, and I drank milk from this cow!

A log raft isn't nice to run, the logs are so bungly. We used to have some pretty hard, and some pretty good times. There were some awful storms on the water, and sometimes I'd be afraid the raft might get loose from where it was anchored, but the Indians said, No fear. No fear. Nothing will harm you while we are here. One time, when the oars were all unshipped by the wind, I promised the Lord that if I ever get home alive, I'd never come down again, but I broke my promise, and went a second time. The pilot's hair stood straight up, but I kept mine down all I could. When we went around the bends, it was just as if there were a rattlesnake under the raft. And when the tugboats pulled against us, the water would come clear into the kitchen. Tugboats got smart. One time our pilot called over to the pilot of the tugboat, If you can't run that raft, we got a woman on here, and we'll set her up there and she'll run it! If a rock in the middle of the river happened to hit the shanty, it would turn bottom side up, and this happened two or three times. I'd jump right through the window!

I used to dread the cabling. It was quite a dangerous job. We hit a tree when we were cabling one night, and it took my shanty slick and clean before we got the raft anchored. They used to pick the wiriest men for this job. You've got to know your business when you snub a raft! My father and his two brothers were pilots. My father never trusted the cabling to his men, but did it himself. At Coldsprings he lost his leg cabling. In this snubber the rope broke and wound around his leg and crushed it. It was tough and humble all the way down the river!

The men got drunk some nights and would fall off the plank and get soused. I was awfully opposed to whisky, and the pilot would get so excited when he had a bottle of whisky, he would only want a spoonful at a time, and I had to give it to him. I never had anything that grated me like that. I told the boys that if they fetched any whisky around the shanty, it would go into the river. Well, they did one night, two or three of them, and in the river it went! So I said, I told you I'd do that. I don't like whisky, boys!

When the raft was anchored near shore, the men would go to town. I went to church several nights, but I couldn't go so much because the men didn't go. Once I went to a school exhibition at Higgonsport on the Ohio River. When I was ready to come back to the raft I'd 'yoo-hoo', and the men would come down and see that I got across the plank all right.

One time they cabled the raft near a foundry on the Allegany side at Pittsburgh, and all the men got out and went to town, leaving me alone on the raft. A man from the foundry cut the raft loose, but when it started going I wasn't scared. I knew I could get on one of the boats. Just in the nick of time the men got back, and swam to the raft. They shouted to me, "Don't jump in!" I called back, Do you think that I am crazy? That fellow up there at the foundry is the one that's crazy!

I worked from four o'clock in the morning to nine o'clock at night. A good days work for a woman. But I would do it today if I could! We ate pork by the barrel. I baked my own bread, a barrel a day. I bought the yeast in a brewery in Allegany. The bread would be gone the next morning before I got the rest baked. We bought two bushels of eggs at once. We'd get out and go in a boat up on the bank and buy eggs at six cent a dozen, goose eggs, duck eggs, turkey eggs, everything! I boiled some and scrambled some. The pilot, Tom Scrogg, didn't want his turned, but dipped on with a spoon. I used to have to baby Tom Scrogg.

Breakfast of pork, potatoes and coffee was as quick as I could get it in the morning after four, as soon as it was light. At ten o'clock it took me just an hour to give them their lunch of crackers and coffee, to go all the rounds. The other rafts would pull up alongside the shanty raft so the men could get their meals. Then we had a hearty dinner of potatoes and meat at twelve, and supper at six, always the same food. No milk, canned or cow's milk, could be had. Once in a while I would make a cake, but that cake didn't amount to anything---might better not have made it. Some would eat two pieces, and some would eat all they could get a hold of. The work didn't amount to anything. At night I would get the dishes done, tin dishes, and get the potatoes peeled for the next day, a bushel or more, and the meat cut up.

Well, we had fun! We would go out the edge of the raft and wash in the morning. They drank river water just as we drink well water now. My husband was a rafter, but he was afraid of the water, and he would say to me, "When you dip a pail of water, don't fall in!" My land, do you think I'd get myself soaked pulling in a pail of water?

One of the men brought me two goose eggs that he told me to wrap up in cotton batting and take home. I didn't know but what it was a joke, but I kept them in my trunk, and every morning I would turn the eggs in the batting. When we reached home, I put them under a hen, and I got a goose and a gander. But the goose got so ugly that I had to give it to Mother!

I had to have my teeth pulled at Higginsport. An old hobo said, "I try to pull teeth," and he put an old chair with three legs out on the grass for me to sit in, and not a thing to hang on to. I'll never forget where I left those teeth, right down the Ohio River, right on the bottom! There was the time the men found milk for me to drink from the cow that floated down the river.

On the first trip the lumber was all sold from the raft just below Pittsburgh. The Monongahela was a raging! The second time we went clear to Cincinnati. We had to wait nine days on the other side of Pittsburgh before going on since the river was so high. Tom Morrison, the Indian, was our pilot this trip. Tom was safe, a might good man, and so nice to me. When I went to bed he said, "I,ll keep you safe till morning.

My husband got typhoid fever soon after we started, and we got a doctor at the place where Grant was born. He had a horse and a saddlebag. The doctor asked what I was going to do, and I said Why, I can take care of him. The doctor wanted him to come up where he lived, but I didn't have any money. The doctor said it wouldn't cost me anything. But I took him with us on the raft, and the men said, "If he dies, we'll stick by you till you die."

My husband was a dreadfully sick man, and we couldn't get any milk for him. When we reached Cincinnati, we left part of the lumber, and then we came home. We took a steamer and went two or three miles, and went up on the bank and took a train. The train switched at Canton, and the Indians, who had gone with us on the first trip met us there, and greeted us, shook me and shook me, so that someone said, "You must be well thought of." I was just glad to see them, too. I'd like to see those boys again. When my husband got out on the depot at Allegany, he went home and didn't walk again for three months. John Frederick Hellwedge, husband of Irene Anderson Hellwedge, died at the age of 83 on March 28, 1935.

I just wish I could have gone once more on a raft, it was so nice. If I had gone the next year, Lee Burr was going to show me how to run the raft. You were always seeing something new. I would go again if I had the chance now. I tell you we saw lots of hardship, and lot of fun.

The reason why I went down the river was because I didn't have an education and couldn't do anything else. I had taken care of babies all my girlhood. I didn't want to be ignorant all my life, so I thought I'd to out and pick up a little. I did learn a lot and came back with an education.

Hellwege,Irene. OHPS Newsletter March/April 2000.
Obituary record. Eileen Smith

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