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"Turners Falls Boat Clubs to Insist on Open River"

(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
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The annual log drives down the Connecticut River filled the river with logs and blocked any other use of the river. Boatmen, who moved trade up and down the river, had often complained that the logging interests had monopolized the river. In some years, booms were built to allow some passage of the river, but they were expensive and time-consuming to build and maintain as they were prone to breaks. The Turners Falls Boat Club had somewhat more influence than the average working boatmen, as it was made up of men of wealth who used the river for their recreation. The conflict detailed in this article came near the end of the log-driving era and the problems here would soon be resolved. Intense logging of the Connecticut Valley watershed of the 1880s to early 1900s would soon mostly deforest the region, and log drives would become a thing of the past.

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