Log jam at Rumford falls

A frightening jam of long logs at the upper falls in Rumford in 1873. A newspaper article published a few years before this incident declared that log jams here were “truly a wonderful sight,” and that on one such drive four million feet of logs lay there “in one immovable mass. . . . The falls are not to be seen.” Those in charge of moving huge masses of timber down the Androscoggin and its tributaries routinely used black powder (and later dynamite) to free-up logs that could not be moved by hand. The men who set the charge were adept in what they did; nevertheless, many fingers, hands, and lives were lost over the years.

1873