RANGELEY – The Rangeley Lakes Logging Museum will once again honor a local woodsman by placing his name in the Loggers Hall of Fame on Friday night, July 23.

This year, Bill Coolong of Phillips will be added to the roster of names. He joins a list that includes Luke Brochu and Clarence Jones, who were inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2003.

Brochu, the general manager of Stratton Lumber, was born in St. Prospere, Quebec, in 1952. His father, Emile, moved his family, including 3-year-old Luke, to Jackman, where Emile worked as woods foreman in Dick Wallingford’s camps.

He worked at Pomerleau’s Store in Jackman, where he sold equipment to loggers, especially Canadians who worked in the woods of Maine.

Luke Brochu painted the ends of pulpwood blue for the river drives and remembers the enormous stacks of pulpwood at Flagg Dam, ready to be bulldozed into the Dead River on its way to the Kennebec and the mills in Augusta.

He and his brothers, Andrew and Andre, had long planned a spruce sawmill in the Stratton area, and in 1979 they set their dreams on paper. With the Fontaine family of Woburn, Quebec, the Brochus incorporated, built their mill in 1980, and in 1981 opened for business. Since then, Luke as served as general manager.

For 15 years, he has served on the board of the Maine Forest Products Council, working as president from 1999 to 2001. He now serves as vice president of the Northeast Lumber Manufacturers Association.

Fellow logger in the Hall of Fame inductee Clarence Jones of Bingham worked as a river driver on the full length of the Dead River drives from 1938 to 1964, as well as on parts of the drives until 1972, when the last drive began at Hayden Landing below Dead River Dam.

Born in 1919 in South Solon, he grew up with five sisters and three brothers.

From a young age he cut wood with his father, a farmer and blacksmith. Jones’ first paying job came when he was 15, cutting wood for $1.25 a day plus board. Four years later came his first river-driving job on the North Branch of the Dead River, and he stayed in a camp at Albion Savage’s Green Farm on Route 16 between Rangeley and Stratton.

“I couldn’t wait to go on the drive in the spring,” he remembers. “Soon as the ice went up, you’re good to go.” He’d work about nine hours a day. “We had lunch carriers who would bring lunch, build a fire, boil tea and sometimes coffee, and they’d have baked beans and another bucket with meat. Sometimes potato salad or something. And they’d have all kinds of cakes and cookies. Whenever you were on the river at noontime, that’s where’d you’d eat.”

Begun in 1985, the Loggers Hall of Fame enables the museum to honor people who have worked in the woods for a significant part of their lives and who have made valuable contributions to lumbering in the western Maine mountains.

“It’s one of the most important things we do,” says the museum’s president, retired logger Rodney Richard Sr.