RANGELEY — The Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum inducted a father-and-son team into the Loggers Hall of Fame on July 24. Named were Clement Field (posthumously) and Bud Field of Rangeley.

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

When asked about changes in the woods, Field said, “D.C. Morton and I, we’re some of the old-time loggers. We used the birch hook and cant dogs and chainsaws. Today, their machines are like lawnmowers. They call them a harvester, and what they do is cut down the trees. Then they limb them by machine, haul them with the machine, load them with the machine and unload with the machine. So a truck driver doesn’t touch a log any more, evidently.”

Field started working in the woods the summer of 1942 after he graduated from Rangeley School. “I drove gravel truck,” he said, “and for two years, we built the road through from Little Kennebago Lake to Coburn Gore.”  Field also helped build the road from Abbott Brook to Parmacheenee, as well as the Lincoln Pond Road that ran across Magalloway to Eustis.

After the roads were built, he hauled logs on them, south to Berlin and north to Coburn Gore and Lac Megantic. For a year or so, Field operated a bulldozer at Coburn Gore and built woods roads there for summer roads. Then, he worked as a timber cruiser for several years.

Field interrupted his work in the woods for World War II. He served first in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, then in Europe with Gen. Patton’s Third Army. A member of the motor vehicle corps, he landed in France about six days after D-Day. After working in the woods for 20 years as a truck driver, timber cruiser and crane operator, Field left to work for the Navy at Redington, where he remained for 37 years, until retiring at the age of 81.

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Of all the aspects of his work in the woods, Field remembered one with special fondness: “I liked the horses,” he said. On the timber cruising job for D.C. Morton, he also tended to the horses on the weekends when their weekday caretakers had returned home to Canada.

Twice a day, Field drove from his home to the logging camp on Deer Mountain. “I wouldn’t let the horses go without feeding them twice. I wanted to make sure they were taken care of. I just went and cleaned them out, fed them, took an hour for a horse to have his lunch. I watered them, grained them, and made sure they were happy,” he said.

His father, Clement, always had a pair of horses that he used for work in the woods. “Father did a lot of woods work when I was younger,” Field said. “He cut wood off Bald Mountain for Bald Mt. Camps and the Barker. When I was first out driving truck for D.C. Morton, Father was woods boss. He worked for D.C. about six years or so, and he was a Rangeley Lakes guide.”

Field and his wife, Elayne, will be married for 62 years in October. The Loggers Hall of Fame plaque with his and his father’s name on it hangs in the museum, and the public is invited to view it from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Labor Day and during the museum open house from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3.


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