Quoddy Nature Notes

Hemlock with cone

Pic is some cones on a lone hemlock that is on our property. I’m not sure why we have only one hemlock, and it is a scraggily one at that, and its murmurs are too soft for me to hear.

Hemlock

Hemlock has a bad reputation.  When hemlock is mentioned, most people immediately think of poor old Socrates forced to drink poison hemlock, Conium maculatum.  C. maculatum can be a dangerous plant, even though it may have some medicinal properties.  Poison hemlock has been inadvertently introduced the Western hemisphere and to Maine, but according to the USDA map it is not here in the Quoddy region.  But this column is about the Eastern Hemlock tree, Tsuga canadensis, or in Quebec, Pruche du Canada.  Think of the state tree of Pennsylvania.  Think of Longfellow  “…This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock…”.  Think of Thoreau relishing his trip in the wilds of Maine and his Native American guide thrusting a handful of fresh cut hemlock twigs into a pot of boiling water to steep and make a refreshing cup of tea.

The range of the Eastern Hemlock roughly follows the Appalachian mountains from Nova Scotia down to Georgia and west to Michigan and Wisconsin.  Where I grew up in Western Massachusetts hemlock was the most popular conifer, and in the winter one could look up at the small mountains and see the dark green of the hemlocks that had grown up along the small streams. It was in these places that deer yarded and grouse, rabbits, squirrels and porcupines could be found.

Hemlock is not prized as a construction material.  It’s not bad, but not as good as pine or spruce, as it splits easily when dry.  As a firewood it’s not bad in stoves, but in fireplaces it snaps a lot and tends to throw out sparks.  Hemlock does have one feature that made it attractive to the early colonists, and that was that its bark could be used for tanning animal skins into leather.  All along its range hemlock was utilized to make the stuff of early American industry: boots, harnesses, belts, saddles, work gloves, blacksmith aprons, and hundreds of other necessities.  The tanneries were often the economic backbone of many towns in rural America during the mid 19th century, especially in the Catskills in upper New York.

In Maine in the 1860’s hemlock ranked a close third behind White pine and spruce as the most important forest product.  This was because of the tanneries in, primarily, Franklin, Androscoggin, Kennebec, and parts of Somerset, Piscataquis and Penobscot counties.  But the production was unsustainable.  The hemlocks were attacked by legions of woodsmen and the logs shipped to feed the necessary bark to the hungry tanneries.  Often the bark was just stripped from the tree, and the log discarded.  When the hemlock ran out, the tannery stopped.

In the summer of 1870 the Shaw brothers, who owned several small tanneries in New York, Maine and Canada, had been looking to expand their business, and bought the hemlock rich Township of Grand Lake Stream, excluding the reservation, for $35,000.  They quickly set up a tannery, and arranged for the local populace to harvest the bark, made connections as far away as Argentina for the hides, and within a few years had the largest and most prosperous tannery in the world.  This was not to last long.  The Shaw brothers’ operation failed in 1883, and the tannery under various ownerships limped along until 1898, when all of the assets were sold.

The relentless attack on the hemlocks was over, but the massive hemlock forests of old were gone.  Some scattered hemlock groves survived, as an  inspiration to tree huggers, but a new, serious threat to hemlocks is making itself known.  The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, (HWA),  an unwelcome Asian bug, was first noted in VA in the 1950’s. It has since spread its range to Maine.  There is a ray of hope for our hemlocks from UVM, where Dr. Scott Costa had been working on developing a fungal control for HWA.  Dr. Costa died from pancreatic cancer last year, but his associates are moving his work forward, and fieldwork is proceeding in Virginia.  It is anticipated that this method or other fungal controls will be tried in New England sites shortly.  I do hope that Pennsylvania will always have a live version of its state tree, and that some future generations will have a chance to listen to  “the murmuring pines and the hemlocks”.