For better or for worse – from pollution to recovery – stories of the mighty Androscoggin have a century-long connection with woodcutting and papermaking.

Maybe not as much as the Penobscot, the St. John or the St. Crois, but our river has its share of log-driving lore. Before any dams were built, there were many times when the Androscoggin was filled from bank to bank with floating logs.

Several large piles of heavy rock rise to the river’s surface at midriver between our farmland and the Lewiston shoreline. Inch-thick rings of rusty iron are sunk in the biggest boulders. They were placed there so heavy chains could be stretched across the river to hold back flows of logs.

Lewiston-Auburn is one of the few Androscoggin communities where paper or pulp was not made. From the Brown Company at Berlin, N.H., to Pejepscot Paper Co. at Topsham, the river has played a historic role in papermaking. In 1868, the first wood pulp in Maine was made in the basement of a sawmill at Topsham. Rags had been the raw material for paper fiber prior to that.

The name of Hugh J. Chisholm is renowned in the industry’s early history. Chisholm built Otis Falls Pulp Co. in Jay in 1888, and it was then the third largest papermill in the nation. Soon after, he also opened Oxford Paper Co. at Rumford.

Chisholm’s Jay mill became one of the founding mills of International Paper Co., now known as Verso.

That connection with the upstream paper mill came home to me about two weeks ago when my brother and I initiated a selective woodlot management harvest on our riverfront land. The L-A area isn’t known for its forestland, but new cutting methods make even small woodlots viable sites for mechanized harvest.

We were astonished by the massive machine that plucked large trees like flowers, flipped them sideways, sliced all branches off in fluid back-and-forth motions and then dropped pre-determined lengths of logs in neat piles – all in a minute or two.

Years ago, men with saws and axes spent hours on such a task. They used horses or oxen to “twitch” the logs out of the woods.

Later, logging suffered a black eye when poorly supervised skidder operations tore up the earth. Clear-cutting methods were abused and delicate shorelands were exposed.

Jim and I are pleased with the care that went into our woodlot harvest. The giant machines leave little evidence of their passage.

Some of our harvest included pine sawlogs, but a lot of it was destined for the Verso mill for paper production. You can’t help recalling a few decades ago when L-A’s inheritance from the paper industry was a polluted river. It seemed so ironic that our wood was headed upriver where much of that regretable legacy originated.

Ownership names and company fortunes have changed a great deal over the years, but Maine papermaking is still significant, and much more compatible with the environment.

It’s good to see linkages between local woodlots like ours with this globally important and historically significant Maine industry.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].