LOST RAFTMEN "COWBOYS"

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Trio tracing the long-lost path of the Susquehanna raftmen 

By AD CRABLE, Lancaster Online

From left, Dennis Brooks, Chip Fulmer and Jay Mackley search for the location of the Fairview Inn along the Susquehanna River in southern Lancaster County, where raftmen stayed while walking home after delivering log rafts in the 1800s.

    This residence fronting the Susquehanna River in Washington Boro was once among more than a dozen hotels that served log raft crews and timber merchants during the rafting days in the 18th and 19th centuries.

      Lancaster County once had its own version of the American cowboy.

      Like the cowboy, raftmen were stereotypical hard-working, hard-drinking men from a long-ago time who stepped up to perform a perilous task needed by a growing nation.

      But while cowboys have been romanticized into icons, the raftmen have all but vanished in memory.

      For more than 100 years, the rafts, which served as both cargo and ship, were floated down the Susquehanna carrying the lumber and goods that built a growing nation.

      The lashed-together log rafts could stretch for 300 feet or more. The rugged crews used giant, 40-foot oars mounted on both ends of the open-air rafts to move the raw or planed timber from upstate virgin forests some 300 miles downriver to Lancaster County riverside towns such as Marietta, Columbia and Peach Bottom.

      There, the rafts were disassembled and sold to local sawmills or lumber merchants from cities such as Philadelphia, or the rafts were pushed back into the river and continued on to the Chesapeake Bay.

      The logs and cut timber became masts, spars and decking for ships. The wood framed barns, homes, covered bridges, mills and factories, propped up coal mines and fueled tanneries.

      From about 1750 to the last of the rafts in 1910, these hardy raftmen navigated one particularly perilous stretch of rapids and boulder-studded channels for 30 miles between Marietta and Peach Bottom.

      Before hydroelectric dams raised the water level and tamed the river, this feared run contained treacherous water at the Turkey Hill narrows, FINISH READING HERE

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