Some time after Penney got some men to drive the wood off the river. Some of them were Joe Wall and Ben Fowler. They were foremen. He then had a steamer coming for the wood. They closed the dam on Warren's Waters and started to pick up the wood. The reason for this was because they had a very small amount of water. Every evening they would close the dam and open it in the morning. That was the way they got the pulp down the river. They cleared each jam as they were going up the river. They put across the boom where Munn used it.

When the steamer came, they would take small boom loads and tow it to the steamer until all the wood was on board. The steamer then went to North Harbour where she finished loading. Some of the men went to North Harbour with her.

PRISON CAMP - DEPRESSION TIMES

In 1929 and earlier in St. John's the Penitentiary was full of lawbreakers. So the government had nowhere to put them all. They had a steamer called the S.S. Meagel. They used her for a prison. She was tied up to the old railway dock in St. John's. That is where the song came from..."I'm sentenced to the Meagel for 21 years".

So in the early to mid 30s a prison camp was built on the Nine Mile Road. They fenced the boglands on the road and had the prisoners ditch it all in order to drain it off. In the wintertime they would cut logs. There was a mill on the side of Murray's Pond. Cliff Linehan and a man from St. Joseph's sawed the logs. They cut a lot of logs on Harricott and put them in the river, but never drove them off it.

In the meantime, the government built a new prison camp at Gull Pond on the Salmonier Line. The prisoners were shifted there before they could drive the logs off Harricott River. A man named Gosse from Spaniard's Bay bought the logs from the government and had men from around drive them off the Harricott River. They had to wait for heavy rain to drive the logs because they had no dam.

Mr. Jack Corrigan was cook at the prison camp on the Nine Mile Road and transferred to the Salmonier Line when the new prison was built.

EARLY VESSELS

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, St. Mary's Bay was full of herring in the spring and falcons in the fall. The vessels from Burin and out west would come to the bay for bait. Also, a lot of large vessels from Lunenberg would come here from the Grand Banks. Mostly they would come for bait and ice because at that time there were not a lot of ice houses around.

Men would cut ice from the pond and store it in the houses. The storage sheds were large – about 50 or 60 feet long and about 20 feet wide. They were usually about 10 to 12 feet high. The ice would be covered with sawdust or bog to keep it from melting. The ice would be about two feet long and about 1½ feet wide or whatever it was on the pond.