Amos Tuttle
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| Amos Tuttle | |
| Born | 1834, New Brunswick |
|---|---|
| Died | 1912, Briarmont |
| Worked for | Hartwell Timber Co. |
| Occupation | Faller, then mill pond hand |
Hartwell Timber Co. hired Amos Tuttle, a New Brunswick man, as a faller in 1858, the company's second season, when the work needed more hands than the first eight men. He was twenty-four, older than the man who hired him. Amos felled with an axe, as one of a pair, standing on a springboard notched into the trunk well above the ground, and a big redwood could keep him and his partner at it for more than a day.
When the steam donkey came into the woods in 1882, the company moved Amos, at forty-eight, down to the mill pond. Logs waited there in the water for the saws; his job was to keep them moving toward the mill with a pole. He worked the pond for the rest of his time with the company.
He boarded at Bridget Nolan's from the year she opened her house. He never married and never owned a house of his own. The company was the only employer he ever had: it paid him, worked him hard and moved him wherever it needed a man. When it was sold in 1911 he was seventy-seven, too old for another outfit to take him on. He died the next year.
His name is in the company's earliest surviving time book, now in the college archive, set down in Lyman Thayer's hand beside his days worked, his days lost to rain and a dollar stopped from his pay for a broken axe handle.