Fraternity-Testvériség, 2008 (86. évfolyam, 1-3. szám)
2008-07-01 / 3. szám
FEATURE A HUNGARIAN LOGGING CAMP V CASS ^ • • • —....." Town of Cass founded in 1900 by WV Pulp & Paper. Organized by William Luke and sons, who purchased 70.000 acres of timber, with extensive red spruce used for paper pulp for Luke. MD and later Covington, VA miils. Hungarian. Italian and Austrian immigrants built railroad to bring timber to band-saw mill upriver and connect to Chesapeake & Ohio RR along Greenbrier River. Sam Slaymaker and Emory Shaffer supervised building of railroad, mill and town for workers. Town named for Joseph Cass, vice president and company investor. Mower Lumber Co. bought & operated. 1942-60. State bought railroad in 1961; town in 1976. Listed on Nat. Register: 1974; 198o! tPOfcSonO B/ '»5S HCUEwOMItiG «1ST ..Bl.MA GIVISI3B AfCHUrS i« M itGuY. Ji»o* One of the best “finds” of my last trip to West Virginia was Whittaker Station Camp #1, constructed in 1900 specifically built to house and employ Hungarian immigrant “wood hicks,” as they were called. Located four miles outside of Cass, West Virginia, the logging camp is accessible only by a railroad powered by a Shay locomotive built to climb the steepest grades and able to swerve around hairpin turns. Today, the Cass Scenic Railroad State Park offers visitors excursions that transport one back in time where they experience the rich history of the past in this area, view the unparalleled beauty of this vast wilderness area, ride an original steamdriving locomotive to an elevation of 3280 feet, and imagine the conditions under which those Hungarians toiled year-round. Below, in the town of Cass, some of the company homes that housed the workers’ families have been restored and are now rented as vacation cottages. In Cass, the company store, post office, train depot and museum offer a context from which to examine the contributions these Hungarian immigrants made to the region. The Cass Scenic Railroad is the same line built in 1901 to haul lumber to the mill in Cass and to return to Whittaker Station Camp #1 with supplies, fuel, and the newly arriving Hungarian loggers. The Shay locomotive is powered by hundreds of pounds of steam pressure so thick, black smoke belches from its stack as it passes under the water tower that fills its tanks. The train rounds the curve up Leatherbark Creek, passes the shop where the locomotives are serviced and repaired and then passes a graveyard of antique locomotive parts. At full-steam, the locomotive traverses two switchbacks, reverses up a steep grade and then ascends into an open field where Whittaker Station is located. The switchback process allows the train to gain altitude to transverse a grade of 11% or 11 feet for each 100 feet of track, remarkable when a 2% grade with a conventional locomotive is considered steep. By Kathy A. Megyeri Passengers disembark at Whittaker Station which has been recreated to show the conditions under which the Hungarian loggers lived and the equipment they used from 1900 to 1940. The centerpiece of this camp is a Lidgerwood tower skidder, one of only two examples left in the world. These huge railcar-mounted machines carried logs out of the woods on aerial cables for distances of up to 3000 feet. The trainride from Cass to Whittaker Station takes a full two-hours, but one can continue on to Bald Knob, the third highest point in West Virginia at an altitude of 4,700 feet where the climate is similar to Canada and boasts the same type of hardwood that one would find north of our U.S. border. After the Civil War and with the Westward Expansion, new deposits of natural resources such as coal and wood were required to support unprecedented growth and the industrial revolution. When these commodities reached their limits of availability in the northeastern states such as New York and Pennsylvania, attention was turned to West Virginia, especially with their mineral resources. Regardless of weather conditions, seasons of the year or the locations of timber and the paper mill, the supply of pulpwood was essential. West Virginia provided an unprecedented 30,000 to 50,000 board feet of wood per acre and because it had both hardwood and softwood varieties of such high quality, the output from the pulp mills was shipped worldwide. Cass was founded in 1900 when William Luke and his sons purchased 70,000 acres of timber with extensive red spruce used to make paper pulp. Immigrant help was needed not only to log the spruce trees but to build the railroad to bring the 28 WINTER 2008
