By RAY WYCHE

Horace Butler can look back on his 85 years of living and boast that he spent some of that time on a job few have worked at — rafting logs down the Cape Fear River.

For most of his adult life, the Elizabethtown resident worked at farming and at timber harvesting. As far as he knows, he’s the area’s only surviving long rafter, men who in the days before good roads and machinery, moved logs to mills by floating them on rivers and creeks.

“I don’t know of any others living,” he says.

Butler was in charge of the last log raft, in November 1957, on the Cape Fear, delivering pine and hardwood logs cut from a tract of timber his father had bought near Fayetteville to mills in Wilmington. He rafted logs “from all up and down the river,” he says, riding the currents to the mills.

On a recent visit to the North Carolina Museum of Forestry in Whiteville, Butler donated some of his timber-related memorabilia to the museum and talked about what it was like to spend up to 10 days living on rafts of logs a few inches above the river surface, drifting along at about one-half mile per hour, night and day.

Butler says his father — and later he himself — harvested timber on land, often on river banks, inaccessible by roads. To build a road would have been expensive, and floating the logs on the river was the most economical way of getting them to the mill.

Butler learned log rafting from his father and he also learned of the hard work involved in log rafting.

The logs were formed into “clamps,” 16-foot logs laid side by side to form a “raft” about 36 feet wide. Logs were held together by nailing small trees across both ends, and clamps were joined by similar small trees called “collars.”

Two slender poles extended outward from the front of the raft to help keep the raft off the riverbanks. Steering was done with two 40-foot pine oars located on the front and rear of the raft that required considerable muscle power to operate.

“It took three or four men to push that oar,” Butler says.

Three men could handle a small raft but up to six were required on larger rafts to keep things going smoothly.

Since the rafts had to go through three locks if they were formed near Fayetteville, the lengths of the rafts was limited to about 200 feet, although some were longer and were broken into units to fit inside the locks.

Depending only on the current for propulsion, log rafting was slow going.

“If you got over one mile an hour, it was dangerous,” he says.

River currents increased after heavy rains upstream poured more water into the Cape Fear but drifting along with the current was still slow.

“Three inches of rain in the Piedmont (headwaters of the Cape Fear) would push the logs right along,” Butler says.

When the two big oars did not require attention to negotiate the bends in the river, the men were free to sleep, eat, observe nature and perhaps fish. Each raft carried a tent and while some men worked, others rested and slept.

“We stayed in the tent and while some worked, others slept.”

Diversions consisted of fishing a drift net, which caught shad and sturgeon. Butler recalls catching a 154-pound sturgeon in earlier days that he sold to a Wilmington fish market for $15, a tidy sum at the time.

Some of the catch was eaten, cooked over an open fire built on the raft. Favorite foods were canned beef and sausage, rice, grits, potatoes, and “always a pot of beans.”

The rafters often went ashore to kill squirrels to eat; all such expeditions did not end happily. Butler’s brother Warren (Tootie), while squirrel hunting, was bitten by a venomous copperhead snake. The crew was forced to tie up the raft to a riverside tree while the victim was carried to a physician for treatment.

On one occasion, Butler says, the crew brought along three coon dogs that treed raccoons and possums to add variety to the men’s diet.
For the entire trip, the men had a firsthand look at nature.

“One of the most beautiful sights I ever saw was a (wild) sow and eight pigs swimming across the river. They were going from Brunswick County to Pender County.”

Butler recalls another of nature’s creatures swimming across the river that decided to slither onto the raft for a rest, a rattlesnake that never completed its journey.

The rafters also noted evidence of man’s intrusion into what appeared to be a pristine wilderness when the aroma of mash “working off” at illegal whiskey stills filled the river area.

Log rafting sounds like a Huck Finn type of living, but hard work and knowledge of the river were involved. The heavy oars had to be manhandled and river conditions studied carefully, night and a day. There was no off time. “We stayed with it. The only time we tied up was at incoming tide.”

Incoming tides could be felt as far upriver as Lock No. 1 near Riegelwood. With proper piloting, rising tides could halt the rafts’ progress or even push them upstream.

“When you hit an incoming tide, you’d better start looking for a tree to tie up to,” Butler says.

Once in Wilmington, the logs were sold to Hilton Lumber Company or to Corbett Package Company. The crews would be picked up by vehicle sometimes or would ride the train to Clarkton where their families would meet them.

Butler says he and his siblings got a taste of log rafting early in life when their father would take them on short segments of trips.

“He put us in the middle of the raft,” he says, as a safety precaution.

The final log rafting in 1957 traveled over territory familiar to Butler. During World War II, he worked on a tugboat pushing gasoline-loaded barges up the river from Wilmington to Fayetteville.

Butler estimates that he made “at least” 50 to 100 trips down river on log rafts. After the last float, he continued in farming and in the timber business and ended his career as a timber cruiser, estimating the amount of timber in prescribed tracts.

Butler remembers fondly his days riding a slow raft of logs down the river.

“I enjoyed it,” he says.

By JEFFERSON WEAVER

An Elizabethtown man recently donated a cache of instruments and records to the Museum of Forestry in Whiteville.

Horace Butler presented the artifacts, packed in a fishing tackle box, to Harry Warren, director of the museum.

Warren said Butler is a frequent donor of artifacts to area museums. Butler is well known as a collector of antique tools and river ephemera, and has donated numerous pieces to the Museum of Forestry.

“Mr. Butler always has something worthwhile,” Warren said.

The box contained instruments, correspondence and other items once owned by Dr. R.W. Graeber, known as the father of modern forestry in North Carolina.

Graeber helped found the School of Forestry at N.C. State University, and was responsible for many state programs that helped modernize the logging industry.

“An auctioneer who handled his estate offered them to me,” Butler said. “I couldn’t say no.”

Graeber may have used the box as a kind of field briefcase. It contained a hodgepodge of measuring tapes, records, chalk, and specialized logging instruments such as pedometers (used to step off distances) and a device to measure the height of standing timber.

“I always did it by eyesight,” Butler said. “I wasn’t even sure how to use this, but I loaned it to a fellow…and he told me it worked fine.”

One of the most telling pieces in the collection is a 1939 letter from a Russian forester. The letter asks for assistance in updating forest management practices in that country. It is decorated with delicate, hand-drawn figures.

Time sheets, records, and technical manuals from the 1930s and 1940s give a detailed insight into the timber and logging industry.

A lifelong logger and woodsman, Butler is well-known in Bladen County as a collector of antique tools and local history. He rode the last log raft to Wilmington on the Cape Fear River with his father and a crew in 1957.

Butler, who is 85, said he enjoys knowing the items will be preserved.

“Mr. Warren’s always been good to me,” he said. “I’m in the sunset of my life, and I know these things are important to let young people know how things were once done. I hope it makes people appreciate how far we’ve come.”

Warren said the donation is “a treasure.” Warren got to know Butler when Warren worked for the Museum of the Lower Cape Fear in Wilmington.

“I can assure you, items like this have a special place in the Museum of Forestry,” Warren said. “We need more people like Mr. Butler.”