When you could hear a pin drop in the forest

SALISBURY — A discussion of the Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk and Falls Village and its history would be incomplete without noting the man who was for many years the town of Salisbury’s tree warden: George Kiefer. 

And in fact on Jan. 17, when the new GMF Director, Hans Carlson, gave a talk at the Norfolk Library, Kiefer’s name came up as he talked about how GMF developed before and after World War II under the direction of Ted Childs.

This reporter visited Kiefer on Thursday, Jan. 22, at his home on Selleck Hill Road.

Kiefer sat in his kitchen, wood stove blazing, and talked about his days at GMF, where he worked from 1948 to 1952 as a forester.

He described the job by season. In the winter, the crew would walk to wherever the job site was, with their axes and crosscut saws.

A constant task was simply thinning the forest out.

“We chopped and sawed and split and piled” 4-foot lengths of wood, for firewood.

“We’d knock off for lunch, make a little fire maybe, have a bottle of water and a sandwich.”

In the spring, Kiefer planted conifers in seed beds and moved the previous crop to transplant beds for eventual transplanting into designated sites in the forest.

“We’d plant them wherever Ted [Childs] wanted.”

Other duties included tending the sugar shack, where maple syrup was made, and delivering firewood to a dozen or so customers.

Kiefer said that Childs tried to take some of the firewood to his Manhattan apartment, only to run into difficulties in getting it unloaded.

“You had to be a union man to unload it,” said Keifer. “It was another world down there.”

In the summer, the crew worked on forest roads. One of Kiefer’s jobs was to set out stakes to indicate culverts.

“I cut chestnut poles. We had a 55-gallon drum with one end knocked out and creosote in the bottom. We’d build a fire and cook the posts so they wouldn’t rot.”

Bugs were a problem in the summer, and insecticides were not an option. There was one particular species of insect that was getting fat on the red pine plantation.

Kiefer said he found a truly hands-on method for getting rid of the bugs.

“If you waved your hand at them, they all stood up. The easiest way to kill them, then, was to just run your hand down the branch and squash them.

“It was the simplest and cheapest way to do it.”

The deer of the GMF were fond of the terminal buds on Norway spruce that were between 4 and 6 feet.

If the deer ate the buds, the subsidiary buds “took over,” and the tree would have a crook in it.

This was undesirable, since the goal was straight trees for lumber.

“Ted figured out a mixture of cow manure and lime. It was the consistency of apple sauce. We’d dab it on the buds in the fall, and it repelled the deer.

“That was ‘wildlife control.’”

Old pastures in the forest were full of blueberries. The crew spent time girdling or cutting trees — usually gray birch or red maple — that threatened to “shade out” the blueberries.

And the crew spent time pruning lateral branches for access. “There were about 1,200 trees per acre in some places,” Kiefer said. “It got pretty crowded in there.”

And all this work was done by hand. Kiefer said there were no chain saws or other power tools at GMF until his third and final year.

“Before chain saws, working in the woods was quiet. A saw and an axe. It was just pleasant.

“There’s so damn much noise in the woods now. It’s a shame.”

The GMF sugar shack in those days worked with sap from between 200 and 400 buckets, Kiefer said. “Pipelines hadn’t been invented.”

Kiefer still makes syrup, with his son, Mat, at the family property on Selleck Hill Road.

He said he’s been making syrup for at least 60 years, and while his son handles the evaporator, Kiefer still does the bottling.

“It’s a lot of work. But it’s good work, and goes with the season.”