The Cookhouse (replica)

The Cookhouse is a new building, built at the museum to recreate the look of a logging camp cookhouse. As early as the 1840s, lumber barons with logging rights in these forests were commissioning land surveys and mapping out riverways in a race to find and chop down trees by the millions. Early surveys used very imprecise landmarks to grant timber rights. Disputes over who owned what became common in the late 1850s when the government started parcelling off the land to farmers and settlers. Some settlers were not permitted to cut down trees in their own backyard because someone else held the logging rights.

When settlers started to trickle in, they weren’t always welcome. James Henry Burke, a lumberman, warned in 1855 that “settlement should be controlled and contained, and not allowed to endanger the timber stands”. Burke felt that settlers “spread fire and havoc through the pine forests” and that the Crown Lands Department was “wanton, foolish and insane” to create townships “where nothing by pine and rock exist”.

This animosity went both ways. Perhaps because teams of lumberjacks and their horses ruined the hard-won roads settlers had built by dragging tonnes of logs across them and yet settlers were on the hook for road maintenance. Historian Graeme Wynn notes that “lumberers were described as the very dregs of Europe, and dismissed as ‘the most depraved and dissipated set of villains on earth’”. In the end, the farmer and the lumber barons came to co-exist. Local farms meant lower transportation costs for hay and food for the lumber camps. Farmers benefited from selling their crops to lumber barons and many farm hands spent their winters in the bush working in lumber camps.