RANGELEY — On July 29, the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum inducted William “Bunk” Spiller of Rangeley and Elijah White Jr. of Carthage and Windham into the Loggers’ Hall of Fame.

Begun in 1985, the Museum’s Logger’s Hall of Fame honors people who have worked in the woods for a significant part of their lives and who have made valuable contributions to lumbering in the western Maine mountains.

“It’s one of the most important things we do,” said museum president emeritus and retired logger Rodney Richard Sr.

Spiller and White join a distinguished list of local woodsmen that includes Cary Keep, Stan Bartash, Raymond Vallee, Edwin Lowell, Lewis Abbott, Clem Field, Bud Field and Robert Wilbur.

Born in 1930, Spiller started work in the woods when he was eight. “Back when we were kids, you helped with the firewood, lugging it,” he laughed. Then he joined his father, Harold, and his uncle Arnold hauling wood, and when Kennebec Pulp and Paper came to Rangeley around 1946, he drove truck for road-building crews. When Bill Ferguson set up his sawmill on Greenvale Cove, Spiller helped cut, haul and saw the logs.

He remembers cutting pine trees nearly three feet in diameter with just a cross-cut. “You didn’t think nothing of it,” he says of working in 55 below zero temperatures. “Just a day in your life, that’s all.”

From 1948 to 1953, Spiller served on a destroyer in the U.S. Navy, and many of his leaves saw him back in Rangeley, working in Ferguson’s sawmill.

After the Navy, Spiller worked for Ferguson, Alton Steward and D.C. Morton. In 1965, he began his 24-year tenure at the Navy Survival School in Redington as maintenance supervisor. When he retired in 1987, he worked once more for D.C. Morton, grading hundreds of miles of road, especially in Parmachenee. “Not too many places I don’t know,” Mr. Spiller laughed. He especially liked grading roads and being “way back in no man’s land. All by yourself. Nobody else around.”

When he was three, White lived in a tar-paper logging camp with his family in Andover Surplus. “I used to spend all day with my father,” he said. “I’d follow my uncle and him in the woods everywhere they went. Learning the trade.”

He deepened his woods knowledge peeling fir when he was 8 or 9 for cutter Randall Knox, earning 10 cents a tree. “I’d come out of the woods, I’d be black from head from head to toe,” White laughed, “but the black flies and mosquitoes didn’t bother you at all!” At 13, he worked in Carroll Noyes’ Carthage sawmill, and he had a logging job as well. For his 15th and 16th summers, he worked on road construction for Frank Rossi, cutting the wood down by hand. And during the school year, he worked in the Carthage birch mill for C.H. Ranger, from four until nine or 10 at night. Weekends, he hauled planer boards to the Farmington mill.

In February 1953, at 17, White entered the Air Force and learned to be a mechanic. On leave, he’d come home and work in the sawmill. When discharged in 1957, he used his mustering out pay to buy a Homelite 520, a gear-driven saw that weighed 32 pounds, loaded. He worked for a time in the Oxford Paper Mill in Rumford and then with his father and uncle in the woods.

When his brother Wayne came home from the army, they formed E&W White and hauled and cut wood. Around 1976 in Canton, he and his father cut the biggest pine tree that was ever hauled into Starbird Lumber Company in Strong. Of the two logs in the tree, the butt log scaled 1400 board feet and the other log, 1200.

White works today with his son Lance as a crane operator on a job for L.L. Bean in Freeport. And his family is glad that he is healthy enough to work. They call him the “logger with nine lives” because he has survived several woods accidents, including a broken back and a broken neck. His quick thinking and that of his fellow loggers helped save his life.

When asked why he stays with woods work, White replied, “It’s the freedom. You can go to work at five in the morning; you can go to work at nine. You have a certain amount of work to do, but it’s the freedom of being your own man.”

The Logging Museum congratulates Spiller, his brother and sisters, his four children and six grandchildren, and White, his partner Ms. Susan Cousens, his 10 children, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. The public is invited to view the Logger’s Hall of Fame plaque at the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum, 221 Stratton Road, open Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., through Labor Day, or by appointment. For more information, call 864-5551 or visit www.rlrlm.org.

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