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HENRY TAYLOR - Stringing the Wire

September 26, 2022 6:30 AM - Barney

Henry Taylor, phone lines

In the use of the fire tower you had to have miles of phone line. We had the fire towers on high hills about every 15 or 20 miles. It was our job in low hazard weather to build and maintain those lines. In 1924, when the department built the Raglan fire tower they ran a phone line in from the municipal line through the bush. That was an awful nuisance for it meant you had to patrol that thing for two miles through the bush when a tree fell on it. So they decided to build a line on the road from Moccasin Lake to Schutt for a distance of three miles. They asked me if I could build it for them.

" Sure I can build your line, for when I was an 8 year old boy I saw the first phone lines built. When I saw the line man climbing those poles I took my father's blacksmith equipment and made a set of climbing irons out of old buggy tires. So I am a full fledged climber."

We would work on building phone lines and access roads with the horses and farmer's ploughs and scraper. We had some rock drills and hammers to drill holes in the stones and blow the top of them with dynamite. They brought me the wire, the insulators, and side block for the line. They sent up from Tweed Malcolm Arden, the Assistant District Forester to give me instruction about putting in the transposer every tenth pole to break up the static.

I used my Model T to build the line. I had a 100 feet of light steel cable and When I put that Ford in ruckseel low and the Ford transmission low it was as slow and powerful as a tractor. I pulled cedar poles out of the swamp along the road with that 100 foot cable and Tom Smith and I built the line.

In the early days of Fire Ranging they had no money for anything. That's why they only had one truck at each chief Ranger's headquarters and us Rangers did the rest of the patrol work with our cars. The only way they could compensate me for the use of my car was to gas it up at the Forestry headquarters and charge the gas to their truck.

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