Ben Foster

“ At the time of those old first settlers, when a person died the neighbours were the undertaker. That was still in effect when I was a young man. I helped to lay away Ben Foster, the last of the Conroy lumberjacks.”

Ben lived on lot 23, Concession 8, Carlow.  He got up one Sunday morning as usual, milked his cows, put the milk through the cream separator, then lay down on the couch and took a stroke. In a few days he was gone. Bill McNeal and Howie Stewart gave Ben a shave, put his clothes on him and laid him out on a storm door on two saw horses in his bedroom. I came to Bancroft with his youngest son Elmer and got a coffin from undertaker Frank Towle. When Bill McNeal and I put Ben into his coffin McNeal put down the lid.

Ben was too high up on the pillow and the lid of the coffin was going to bend his nose, so I said to Bill McNeal, “ that will never do.” So we took Ben out and I got my jackknife into that pillow and took out a few handfuls of fine wood shavings, so letting Ben down in his last resting place. I sure counted it a privilege to look after the last of the old Conroy Company lumberjacks.

Earlier, Ben had told me about cutting an extra big pine tree on the old Conroy farm. He said it was a crotch tree. There was one sixteen foot log in the butt up to the crotch. That butt log at sixteen feet was eight feet in diameter and the Doyle log rule in use at that time gave 8364 board feet for that one log. Ben told me that it took them two days to get that one log about one half mile to the York River using two heavy yoke of oxen.

They broke a lot of equipment in the process and I am of the opinion that they might just as well have left that log where it was for those logs were driven down the York, the Madawaska  and the Ottawa Rivers to the saw mill at Ottawa and if that big log got stranded on a sand bar or stones in the rapids it would take an army of men to roll it clear. So it’s doubtful if Ben Foster’s big pine log ever reached Ottawa.