Telephone Poles in the Woods

It was the oddest thing to be way back in the woods and come across a clearing with a telephone pole standing in the middle of it. Just a single pole with the insulators still intact and a few inches of wire still attached. It was a telephone line going nowhere because there were no other poles visible in the thick woods surrounding the clearing. I first came across this years ago x-c skiing in the woods back of town. My skiing buddies and I figured it was a remnant of an old and long abandoned telegraph line that might have run between Saint John and Fredericton many years ago. We were partly right.

I got thinking about the poles again when I was out skiing this winter and came upon a number of them in a bog. They were standing almost upright and spanned one edge of the bog. Until then I had only seen a single pole in the woods. (I took photos of the poles in the bog and posted them at rivervalleyrambler.com)


Even with this new discovery the story behind these telegraph poles still remained a mystery until I met Richard Likely walking his dog one afternoon this winter. Richard knows the woods around Grand Bay-Westfield like the back of his hand. He’s been hiking and skiing these trails for many years. In fact he cut many of them. We got talking and I asked him about the poles. Not surprisingly, he knew quite a bit about them.

He said he heard the story from his father and from Ken Cox, the former head of NB Tel. He told me these mysterious poles were not for the telegraph, as I originally thought but for a special telephone line. According to Richard it dates back to the second world war when U.S. President Roosevelt was in regular communication with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in London. Our own PM Mackenzie King felt left out of the loop so he ordered a special telephone line built from Ottawa to Cape Breton and then by underwater cable to London. The line was used during the war years and then abandoned.

I tried to research this telephone line on the internet but couldn’t find any mention of it. I did discover an interesting history of undersea cables. Apparently the first transatlantic cable ran from Newfoundland to Ireland and dates back to 1856. It operated about a month before it failed.

Richard Likely went on to tell me that after the war the telephone poles were in high demand by the locals. They’d cut them down and haul them out of the woods and take the wire as well. That’s why there are so few poles around today. Richard said his father told him that people would steal the poles but leave the cross-arms laying in the woods. This he said was a mistake because the 4 x 6 cross pieces were made of knot free BC fir that was far more valuable than the poles. People here didn’t realize it. He said in those days it was a big job hauling the poles out of the woods because there were no snowmobiles or ATV’s.


So that’s the story of the mysterious poles that appear occasionally in the woods around here. I got thinking it would be fun to try to follow the line but I’m not sure enough poles remain to do that. I attempted it this winter on skis but quickly lost sight of the next pole in the woods. The surrounding trees tower over the telephone poles now and make them difficult to spot. It would be an interesting adventure and maybe one day I’ll try it.

It’s still a mystery to me why a number of the telephone poles with cross arms still remain standing in this bog. I suppose when people were cutting them down and hauling them away, they couldn’t get at these poles very easily because of the water. Maybe they never thought of coming out in the winter when the ice would make the job much easier. Whatever the reason, it’s good that a little trace of this history still remains, hidden for the most part but a great delight to find.