This week: Harvestfest and Hancock Mill tours probably ranked as the top items for the week; but the new sign on the Victoria Inn should also be noted.

The Hancock mill tour I went on had seven guests and the tour was conducted by a mill supervisor—we went through the sawmill and then the planer mill so it was from logs to finished, packaged boards. Our tour guide noted that about 25 percent of the boards went to Lowe’s stores. Generally the tour showed us how the logs are cut into useable lumber in an assembly line fashion much like a car is assembled. The process maximizes the amount of useable boards that can be obtained from each log. Computers, imagery measuring and conveyors are the system’s backbone along with lots of human monitoring and some adjustments.

Harvest fest on the Common enjoyed excellent weather and it seemed like more than the available seating was needed for the variety of chowders to be lunched on. I thought one of the really nice additions to this years event was the petting “zoo” for youngsters.

On Main Street the recently new sign at the Victoria now the Grand Victorian Inn refers to its original owner, John Philbrook. John Philbrook (1840-1923) was probably one of the most vigorously active businessmen in the Bethel area for over 30 years. His vigor showed in the field of livestock buying and selling applied to a trade that is virtually unknown here in the 21st Century.

During his active years Mr. Philbrook covered a territory that at times took in eastern Vermont, Canada and a wide swath north and west of Bethel village. His livestock shipments by rail were so numerous the Grand Trunk Railroad constructed stockyard corrals at their stations in West Bethel and Bethel.

Lastly, another history question: who and how moved the huge Ceylon Rowe Store safe from its old location in the former Rowe store adjacent to the 1940’s Fire Station down Main Street to Brooks Bros.?

Some history of the Chadbourne/Hancock mill complex development

After World War II Philip Chadbourne moved his company’s mill located on the Songo Pond Road to the general Walker’s Mills area. Phil Chadbourne purchased the Jonathan Abbot house in the late 1940s and converted the building into an apartment house for mill employees. The Chadbourne’s mill complex continued to expand until 2000 when the company sold its mill property in South Bethel to Hancock Lumber Company.

Hancock started operating the mill in May of 2000. Closing on the sale of the property occurred later that year. A division of the P.H. Chadbourne Company, Chadbourne Tree Farms, retained a large portion of the mill yard for its operations. Philip Chadbourne died July 8, 1994. It is quite likely that his sawmill’s annual output exceeded the previous annual combined output of all Bethel’s sawmills of an earlier age. The Chadbourne sawmill was remodeled in 1993. It was a mix of new machinery: edger, trimmer, and sorter, and the best of the existing machinery: debarker, headsaw, resaw, and bull edger some that dated back to the 1960s; a new debarker came in 1998.

The old planer mill, with a 50 yr. old Woods machine, stayed and a completely new planer mill was built in 1996. Machinery and efforts were in motion to produce 100,000 board feet in a nine-hour day. More machinery – saw carriage, horizontal resaw, large sash gang – was added by Hancock between 2001 and 2007 which has brought the hourly production to between 14,000 and 16,000 board feet per hour. The old planer mill was abandoned by the Hancock Company at the time of the purchase and a new Weinig moulder was added in 2010 to the 1996 planer mill to run along with the Coastal planer.

The Chadbourne/Hancock facility started on its exciting electronic journey in 1993; today the mill complex is (in 2010) a state of the art electronic world. You could open your laptop computer any place in the world and monitor (2010) the individual machine production as it was being made in Bethel or at the other Hancock mills in Casco or Pittsfield.

Thanks to George Nickerson for most of the above mill growth information.

Methodist Church Saturday sidewalk market.

Rowe Store safe at Brooks Bros.