WOMAN COOK IN THE WOODS: A woman wearing an apron is standing next to a male cook and a man on a sleigh of logs being hauled by a horse.
When thinking about the history of work in the New Brunswick woods, it is important to remember that women also played a part in the history of work in these operations. Their participation was facilitated by the structure of the industry, in which small family-based “jobber” camps were prevalent. The wives and daughters of loggers were often relied upon to cook in the lumber camps in order to maximize the gains of the family operation. While cooking was the most common kind of work for women in the lumber camps, they also engaged in clerical work, and some women participated in the production of lumber and pulpwood. The women who worked as cooks in the lumber camps were often expected perform other kinds of domestic work as well, and many women brought their children to the camp.
In an oral history research project undertaken in 2008-09, interviews were conducted with 12 women who worked in the woods at various times between 1920 and 1960, and the results confirm that cooking was the most common occupation. Of the 12 women interviewed about their experience working in the woods, nine worked as cooks. These women worked from morning until night, seven days a week. They had to cook three to four meals a day, and the number of men they had to cook for ranged from seven to 48. The men needed to consume large quantities of food in order to perform their arduous work in winter weather. Some of the staple foods in the camps included pancakes, beans, roast pork and pies.
Most of interviewees reported having breakfast ready by five or six in the morning, and in many cases some of the preparations were made the night before. Women often packed lunches for the logging crew to bring with them to the woods. Interviewee Greta Innis, for instance, had 44 men in the camp, and she had to prepare 88 lunches because the men needed two lunches each during the course of their day's work. Fortunately several interviewees had the help of an assistant, also known as a cookee. Only one of the interviewees, Barbara Chase, cooked for the men while they were working on the river drive in the spring. She cooked on the water on a scow with a tar paper shack on it, also known as a wangan or wanigan
NEW SETTLER AND FAMILY: A family involved in a “shacking” operation, a family-based mode of production in the woods in which all of the family members assisted in the work.
Bookkeeping and other administrative work was also performed by women in the New Brunswick lumber camps. In addition to cooking, Greta Innis had to keep a tally of the logs the men cut in the woods. She also had to keep track of what the men took from the wangan box which held a number of items the loggers required during their stay. Another interviewee reported that her mother, Winifred Beatty, had to keep the accounts and payrolls up to date in addition to her cooking duties.
A significant number of New Brunswick women engaged in logging. Many New Brunswick woods workers migrated to the Maine woods in order to work on logging operations. This involved a regressive labour system called “shacking” . It was a family-based mode of production in which a shacker and one or two relatives would build a shack and cut and haul pulp. All of the family members would assist in this operation. Women also cut wood alongside their husbands on Crown land lots. Even in the 1920s, hundreds of families moved onto 100 acre lots on the Crown lands of New Brunswick under the so-called Labor Act, a program originally started in the mid-19th century to promote agricultural settlement. One woman interviewee, who is given the pseudonym Claudette, lived in a settlement in Bronson. In1922 she went into the woods to a lot half a mile from home to cut pulp alongside her husband for the F.E. Sayre Company.
Life in the lumber camps brought many challenges. Camps were designed for temporary use and as a result many were in rough shape. While improvements went into building the camps following the Second World War, these changes were not as pronounced in jobber camps where women usually worked. The camps of the interviewees varied considerably. In terms of sleeping arrangements, the bunkhouse accommodated the logging crew, and cooks were given the advantage of having their own sleeping quarters in the cookhouse. The cookhouse and the bunkhouse were separated by a roofed-over section called a dingle. These were quite close quarters, and the spread of sickness and the presence of bedbugs was not uncommon
NORMA'S FIRST CAMP: An image of the first camp Norma Tucker cooked in. Norma worked in the woods from 1956 to 1962.
Traveling to camps was often time-consuming and not without obstructions. Indeed, during the interviews many of the women had vivid memories of particularly difficult experiences traveling many miles in and out of the woods. The interviewees relied on varying means of transportation, which included horse and wagon, walking, and in later years, traveling by vehicle for part of the distance.
The interviewees described a number of other chores they completed in addition to their cooking and administrative responsibilities. This included mending clothes, scrubbing floors, caring for injured men, cleaning the cook's camp and the men's camp, and washing clothes on a washboard. Some of the interviewees also raised their children in the camps. The fact that the lumber camps were far from any doctors and were hastily built made raising children in the woods another challenge for women. All these responsibilities left little leisure time for women working in the woods, but they were among family and nevertheless accumulated positive memories. As interviewee Norma Tucker states, “You had to make a life…and we were busy” .