By Nick Howe:   In 1882 most of the White Mountains land was state-owned until the middle of the 19th century; then it was more or less given away to private owners. Timber barons headed the list of recipients: Three operators divided up the Pemigewasset Wilderness, and the Kancamagus Highway runs for its entire length on the skid ways and railroad beds they built. This was the heroic age of American history and the approach of these three men defined the choices of American enterprise then and even to this day. One tract of 75,000 acres went to Daniel Saunders, an unlikely woodsman who had a law degree from Harvard and the look of a rector in an English cathedral town. Indeed, he was a highly placed authority on legal matters in the Episcopal church, and in 1876 he started a mill town at the northern edge of the wilderness that would eventually include 150 residents and up to 200 choppers in the woods. Selective cutting is the practice of taking only mature trees and leaving the rest to grow while the choppers move on to the next mature stand. This term was not in the timber baron's vocabulary or even widely understood when Mr. Saunders went to work. He was the only operator who used this method. The Saunders family was so careful that they cut over most of their land three times and still had virgin trees standing after 41 years of work.

Fire was the great enemy. The timber barons were interested in only the long trunks of the trees and thus often left behind immense piles of limbs and the slender upper sections of the trees -- what the British call "lops and tops." These vast tinder boxes could be ignited by lightning, by a careless match, or even more easily, by sparks from the wood-burning locomotives of the timber railways. It's a measure of the Saunders family's devoted stewardship that no fire ever burned in their domain.

The largest of the operators was J. E. Henry, who advanced into the wilderness from the Zealand Valley in the north and then from Lincoln in the west, a company town built and personally owned by Mr. Henry. He was in business from 1881 to his death in 1912, and he was relentless. His men worked 11-hour days, which were regulated by 47 posted rules, 28 of which concerned the proper care of horses. Mr. Henry paid each of his men in person while carrying a gun on his hip, and he brooked no arguments. When one of his choppers settled up his account at the end of the winter, he saw a substantial deduction for tobacco at Mr. Henry's store. "I don't use tobacco," said the chopper, "you can ask any of the men." "That's all right," snapped Mr. Henry. "It was there if you'd wanted it."

The property lines of the timber barons' vast holdings were often disputed, and these were not trivial matters. The first serious disagreement involved the Saunders operation, and it went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Local ingenuity settled other arguments. There was, for instance, the line along the height of land between mounts Carrigain and Kancamagus. It divided the Saunders and Henry holdings, and the two men did not agree on the exact location, so Mr. Henry sent the sheriff to arrest the Saunders choppers near the height of land, and he jailed them in Lincoln. Independent investigation found that the Henry choppers were at fault. Then Mr. Henry returned to thought and came up with a more subtle plan: It was said that he counted noses and then sent so many of his men to live in Livermore that they could form a voting majority and redefine the property lines.

 Unlike the judicious Saunders family, the Henry ideal was to mow the wilderness, to clear off the land so completely that logs could be rolled down the mountainsides to the skid ways and then hauled to his mills by train. These were not narrow-gauge railroad lines; they were full commercial width, and their location as well as the labyrinth of skid ways made for complicated undertakings. This was the work of Levi "Pork Barrel" Dumas, an unlettered French Canadian, whose instinct for location and gradient would be the envy of today's best civil engineers. While most loggers had a single-track operation, Mr. Henry built an empire with more than 20 deep-woods camps and more than 50 miles of railroad for six engines and extras he leased as needed; the trains would make two or three runs a day -- a top haul was 28 laden cars -- and telephone lines connected the camps and regulated traffic in "Henry's Woods."

Mr. Henry's profligate ways led to three major fires: 12,000 acres burned in 1886, 10,000 in 1903, and 35,000 in 1907. Writers told of the "devastating efficiency" and "abomination of desolation" of the Henry operations. In the summer of 1907, the sky was darkened by smoke as if from a volcanic eruption. When the land had cooled, scientists declared that the ground was profoundly destroyed, that it was sterilized into the upper layers of bedrock, and that no green thing might ever grow there again. When the Henrys sold out in 1917, they transferred 100,000 acres largely given to stumps and ashes.

The third member of this epochal trio was Oakleigh Thorne, who started into the wilderness from Conway on the east side. He was as different from the other two giants of the Pemigewasset as they were from each other; he was a cultured New York financier and a member of the Tennis and Racquet Club and the Westminster Kennel Club. He used to arrive in the North Country riding in a seat attached to the running board of his chauffeur-driven Packard roadster. Mr. Thorne began work in 1906 and would eventually build 20 miles of track. However patrician and picturesque Oakleigh Thorne might have been, he was an absentee owner: He let work out to subcontractors, and his operations were so anonymous that local residents and imported workers alike spoke only of "the Company," the very model of a modern corporate life. This did not indicate a lack of character, however, and work habits were strictly enforced: One morning the foreman lit a stick of dynamite under his choppers' shanty to hasten their way out to the cuttings. "The Company" ceased operations in 1916, the last of the rapacious Henrys was gone in 1917, and the saintly Saunders left their woods in 1927.

Nature sees things in a longer span than we do. The railroad beds and skid ways laid out by Pork Barrel Dumas are still engraved on the land, and hikers still find iron artifacts remaining from those wilderness empires, but it is impossible to find any differences in the woods once claimed by such completely different men. Now it again belongs to hikers and hunters and fishermen, the same as before any of the timber barons began their immense work. -----end

Daniel Saunders Biographical Sketch
Source Material Boston Biographical Review

HON. DANIEL SAUNDERS, senior member of the law firm of Daniel, Caleb & Charles G. Saunders, of Lawrence, Mass., was born in Andover, Essex County, October 6, 1822, the eldest son of the late Hon. Daniel Saunders, founder of the city of Lawrence. He is of early New Eng- land Colonial stock, being a lineal descendant of William Saunders, who, we are told, came from England in 1636, and in 1645 took up land at Mitchell's Eddy, on the Haverhill side, in the town of Newbury, Mass., where he was a permanent settler. James Saunders, the grandfather of Daniel, the special subject of this sketch, was born in Salem, N.H., July 12, 1751, and died in Stanstead, P.O., December 14, 1830. On November 15, 1774, he married Elizabeth Little, who was born March i, 1755, in Newbury, Mass., a daughter of Henry Little, and died in Salem, N.H., April 13, 1838. Henry Little also was of English extraction, and the representative of one of the old and prominent families of Essex County, an ancestor, several generations removed, having been the original owner of a Newbury farm that is still in the possession of his Little descendants.

James Saunders and his wife had a family of twelve sons and one daughter. One son died in in- fancy, and one at the age of sixteen years. The ten sons remaining and the one daughter all married and reared children. One son, Caleb Saunders, became an early settler of Illinois, while three of his brothers located in Eastern New York. One of them, Henry Saunders, M.D., was for many years a prominent physician of Saratoga; another. Major William Saunders, a resident of Ballston Spa, was an officer in the War of 1812; another son, Samuel, was a carpenter on board the famous old ship "Constitution" in the same war.

The Hon. Daniel Saunders was born in Salem, N.H., June 20, 1796, and when a young lad began working in a woollen-mill as an employee in the lowest department. He gradually became familiar with all branches of the industry; and, when ready to establish himself in business, he purchased a mill in North Andover, on the Cochicewick Brook, and later bought another in Concord, N.H.

Becoming convinced in his mind that some time in the near future the falls in the Merrimac River between the present cities of Lawrence and Lowell would be utilized by manufacturers, he began in 1832 to verify by a personal inspection surveys which had previously been made for another purpose, that of estimating the expense of building locks and canals so that the river would be navigable for large boats of merchandise. His examinations still further convincing him of the possibility of the development of a large manufacturing district in this section, he sold his large mills in Concord and North Andover, and invested every penny he coulil lay his hands on in lands bordering on the Merrimac, in order that he might control the water power. Consulting then with his son Daniel, the subject of this sketch, as to the best means of calling the attention of the public to this most desirable location for mills, they decided to build a manufacturing plant themselves. In 1837, therefore, his legal adviser, the Hon. Josiah G. Abbott, then' a member of the General Court, secured for him an act incorporating the "Shawmut Mills" to be erected in Andover, not saying in what part. In the charter granted, the name of Saunders was not used, those of Caleb Abbott, Arthur Livermore, and John Nesmith only being apparent.

Prominent manufacturers near by were then told of the grand water power. Samuel Lawrence and others of Lowell investigated the matter, and found two good places for damming the river, one at Peters Falls, the other at Bodwell's, the location of the present dam. The Merrimack River Water Power Association was soon after formed, with Daniel Saunders as president and manager of the company, which consisted of Mr. (afterward Judge) Hopkinson, Samuel Lawrence, John Nesmith, Daniel Saunders, Jr., Nathaniel Stevens, and Jonathan Tyler. The president of the company originated a plan for bonding the lands in the vicinity of both falls; and, when the present site was selected as the most favorable point for operations, the neighboring farms were purchased at a reasonable price. His own real estate, which he had previously bought, he sold at the original price plus simple interest on his investments, although, had not his high sense of honor forbidden him, he might have asked and received almost any sum.

A large portrait of the Hon. Daniel Saunders, upon which is a tablet stating that he was the founder of the city of Lawrence, was presented to the city by his sons in April, 1888, and now graces the Akiermanic Chamber of the City Hall.

On June, 1821, he married Phebe Foxcroft Abbott, who was born February 8, 1797, in Andover, Mass., and died March, 1890, in Lawrence. Her father, Caleb Abbott, was three times married ; and of his three unions there .were fifteen children. The maiden name of her mother was Lucy Lovejoy. Daniel and Phebe Foxcroft Saunders had five children, namely: Daniel, born October 6, 1822; Charles, who was born in June, 1824, and was extensively engaged in the manufacture of lumber in Lowell until his death in May, 1891; Martha, who died in childhood; Martha, the second, who also died at an early age; and Caleb, born September 4, 183S. On May 3, 1845, the parents removed from Andover to Lawrence, and, having settled on the farm previously purchased, there spent their remaining days, the father's death occurring October 8, 1872.

Daniel Saunders, the younger, studied law with the Hon. Josiah G. Abbott, and was for some years closely associated with his late father in his various enterprises. He continued his law practice all the time, however, and is now at the head of one of the best known legal firms, of this section of Essex County. He was Mayor of Lawrence in i860, at the time of the fall of the Pemberton Mills. In commemoration of his distinguished services, in the care of those wounded at that time and the relief of the families of those killed, he was presented by the citizens of Lawrence, irrespective of parties, with a magnificent silver service, which he prizes as one of his most valuable treasures. He served a year as Senator, and also he has represented the city in the lower branch of the State legislature.