New fire tower replicates the era of fire lookouts

New display part of Natural Resource Center

Visitors to the 158th Fryeburg Fair will find a newly constructed fire tower that replicates the Kearsarge North (Pequawket) Tower located in Bartlett, N.H.The new tower is located near the newly renamed Natural Resource Center, formerly the Forest Resource Center.We think people will get a kick out of the new fire tower display, as we will have information at its base detailing the history of fire towers. We hope some former fire tower lookouts will stop by and share their stories with visitors, said fair president Roy Andrews during a tour of the fairground the week prior to the start of the fair.Any former fire tower observers interested in participating in the exhibit are asked to call Natural Resource Center Superintendent Judy Haynes at (207) 935-3268. The Kearsarge North or Pequawket Tower, as it is known, was built in 1901 and staffed until 1968. The tower was transferred from the state to the U.S. Forest Service in 1951 and restored in 1991.On a clear day, the Pequawket Tower will be visible due west from the Fryeburg tower, a distance of about 15 miles. It is the only federal tower still standing in Maine and New Hampshire.The 11-by 11-foot tower interior at the fairgrounds will include the map stand that came out of the Pleasant Mountain Tower along with an original Aladae sighting device. Maine once had more than 107 fire towers, said Maine Forest Ranger Mark Mayhew, who has been the primary resource on the project. They were phased in and out over the years through a cooperative effort among the Maine, New Hampshire and U.S. forest services.This came out perfect, Mayhew said days before the fair as he watched the finishing touches being put on the structure. The towers operated from roughly when the snow went off, around April 1, until late October or early November when the fire danger subsided. Telephone was the primary means of communication. Radios werent used until the late 40s.The towers were staffed by lone sentries. Perhaps the most colorful of the lookouts was Jigger Johnson, who staffed the Carter Dome tower in 1928 or thereabouts. Jigger after whom a White Mountain National Forest campground is named was a notorious log driver in that wild era of logging men, and he would have no doubt fit right in and enjoyed the fair's annual Woodsmen's Day, held on the Monday of fair week every year. His camp was located off the Kancamagus Highway side of today's Bear Notch Road in Albany and Bartlett.Rob Burbank, now public affairs director for the Appalachian Mountain Club, in the 1980s interviewed then White Mountain National Forest Public Information Officer Ned Therrien about the history of fire towers on the forest for an article that appeared in The Mountain Ear newspaper of Conway. Therrien said fire lookout towers stood on Kearsarge North, Carter Dome, Mts. Osceola, Carrigain, Garfield, and Hale, and on Chocoruas Middle Sister peak, among other mountains in the forest. But the cost of maintaining the structures, paying the lookouts, and maintaining telephone lines to the towers was deemed too high as far back as the early 1950s, and, by the mid-1970s, fire detection by aircraft had eclipsed the importance of the national forest towers.Therrien said the towers were a necessity in the early part of the century, when slash from widespread logging operations littered the hillsides and posed a forest fire threat. Land was first acquired for the national forest in 1914, and shortly thereafter, the U.S. Forest Service began its fire detection efforts, often relying upon lookouts perched atop crude, wooden towers, according to an article written by Therrien in the March 1979 issue of Appalachia Bulletin.Towers on the White Mountain National Forest were often shorter than the standard of 100 feet used throughout the country, Therrien told Burbank, because they were often located on high peaks with good sight distance. Earlier towers were often made of wood, while steel girder construction became the standard in later years. N.H. Lookout Towers: A Short HistoryThe following history about fire towers appears on the state of New Hampshire's Department of Resources and Economic Development Web site, and uses information from A Field Guide to New Hampshire Firetowers, by Iris W. Baird and Chris Haartz published for the 1992 third annual conference of the Forest Fire Lookout Association:A number of developments in New Hampshire about 1900 set the stage for what became a major cooperative effort in fire detection. First was the heavy "cut and get out" logging that left widespread logging residue. Second came a series of dry summers, which, with sparks from wood-burning locomotives used to haul out the timber, set the woods afire repeatedly in the years 1888 to 1903.Increased recreational use of the northern woods, led especially by members of the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), brought these conditions to the attention of persons able to translate their concerns into organized action. The New Hampshire Forestry Commission was established in 1881 and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests in 1901. By 1909 New Hampshire was sharing the cost of fighting forest fires with the towns, and by 1911 John W. Weeks of Lancaster, N.H., had secured passage of an act establishing national forests in the eastern United States by arguing that they would provide watershed protection and ensure the supply of power to the textile mills.In 1908 Philip Ayres, forester for the Society for the Protection of N.H. Forests, published a series of articles in The Granite Monthly calling for New Hampshire to take steps to preserve its woodlands. He gave examples from the west and from Maine of, among other things, forest fire lookout stations.Fire lookouts, permanent fixed sites from which to spot forest fires, originated in the west before 1900. The first lookout in the east was reportedly on Squaw Mountain in Maine in 1905. (Note there is evidence that not only was Croydon station the first New Hampshire tower but it may have been the first in the East as early as 1903.) In the fall of 1909 the state found itself with $599.39 of unexpended fire fighting funds, and got permission to purchase telephones, wire and fixtures for five lookout stations. There were already two lookouts on private land: Croydon Peak in the Draper Company-Blue Mountain Park, and Mount Rosebrook, operated by the Mount Pleasant Hotel in Crawford Notch.The Appalachian Mountain Club, which had title to the summit of Kearsarge North (Pequawket) let a lookout use the ruined hotel on that summit and run a phone line to the valley. With this cooperation from the private sector, New Hampshire entered the lookout business.New Hampshire State Forester Edgar C. Hirst next called a meeting in Gorham in March 1910 at which he explained to the major timberland owners what Maine, New York and Vermont were doing and asked for support. The timbermen contributed $4,100 on the spot and organized themselves into the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association. This group later assessed itself a penny per acre per year for fire detection, on a total acreage of about a million acres.In the summer of 1910, 10 additional lookouts went into service. Of these, three Mount Agassiz, Mount Madison and Mount Moosilauke already had some sort of summit occupancy with telephones, with whom contacts could be made. Aziscoos, in Maine, was operated by the Maine Forest Service, with which New Hampshire entered into a cooperative agreement. There was a hotel on Moosilauke, and the AMC caretaker at Madison Hut had a phone connected to Ravine House in Randolf. The N.H. Timber Owners Association supplied funds for seven additional stations: Magalloway, Sugarloaf, Signal, Cambridge Black, Pine, Carrigain and Osceola.As the state made funds available, these stations were taken over by the N.H. Forestry Commission and 12 more were added. The state built towers on Monadnock, Beech Hill, Federal Hill, Uncanoonuc, Teneriffe and Craney Hill. The N.H. Timber Owners Association built stations at Deer Mountain (Pittsburg), Dix Peak, Mount Cabot, Mount Chocorua, Black Mountain and Mount Stinson.In 1912 there were 12 stations owned by the state and another six by N.H. Timber Owners Association. By 1913 there were 26, the state having added Belknap, Blue Job, Kearsarge South and Pawtuckaway, and N.H. Timber Owners Association having dropped Dix Peak and added Mount Israel. The federal government was operating Carrigain and Kearsarge North, but had not yet taken ownership of either. By 1917 the state was operating 29 stations.During much of this early period the watchmen, especially those on the N.H. Timber Owners Association stations, were woodsmen employed by the timber operators during the winter. They built their own cabins and towers, mostly of local materials, and usually of pretty basic design.During the 1920s the state began to replace these rough log structures with steel towers, and to add lightning protection and more sophisticated phone lines. In the 1930s visits by the general public had increased to the point where it seemed wise to replace tower ladders with stairs, and install roadside directional signs and trail markers. The role of the fire lookouts in public education about forest fire prevention led the U.S. Forest Service to print up "Squirrel Cards" and pass them out to certify that the holder had visited a tower, and enlist the holder's support for fire prevention.In 1938 disaster struck. The Great Hurricane blew down much of the northern forest, and a number of towers as well. At the same time the Civilian Conservation Corps provided manpower and materials for major rehabilitation. During the 1939-40 period the state added towers at Bear Hill, Miller Park, Sam's Hill and Warner Hill, and the U.S. Forest Service built towers at Cherry Mountain., Cooley Hill, Deer Mountain (Kilkenny), Grandview, Iron Mountain, Mill Mountain and West Royce.During World War II many of the towers shut down for lack of manpower. The U.S. Forest Service recruited WOOFs (Women Observers on the Forest) to staff a number of stations, including Black Mountain, Cherry Mountain, Chocorua, Pequawket (Kearsarge North) and Cooley Hill.By 1948 the use of aircraft for fire spotting and a decline in fire danger led to the closing of many stations. The U.S. Forest Service marked 10 towers for demolition and retained seven, some on inactive status. By the end of the 1960s these were all out of service and only the state towers were left. (Abandoned towers were believed to be hazardous, so many of these were removed over the next decade.)From time to time, especially in dry summers, various private observation towers around the state were called into service as temporary lookouts. It was also department policy to supplement the tower network by using as observers people who lived on high ground and had good views of their surrounding territory.By 1980 only 22 towers were in operation. Three aerial detection routes were operated by four private aircraft contractors. By 1982 the network was reduced to 14 towers; all were closed by June 9, 1983 for lack of funds. At this time the towns around Rock Rimmon tower requested and received permission to man the tower on a volunteer basis.The next year the towers were operated on a part-time basis. The following year weather turned dry and the towers had to get extra funds and remain open many more hours.In 1992, 16 stations were in service, 15 funded by the state and one (Red Hill) by the town of Moultonboro. This continues to be the case today. The exhibit at the Fryeburg Fair will no doubt rekindle the public's fascination with fire towers of old. The romanticism toward that era remains strong, as the image of a lone fire sentry doing his job, gazing through a pair of binoculars from his perch atop a mountain, remains synonymous with that of the U.S. Forest Service itself.For more information, call the fair at (207) 935-3268.