An internet search of Maine’s most noteworthy inventions invariably lists earmuffs, microwave oven, zigzag stitches, Maxim’s machine gun, sealed-diving suit, and steam-powered automobile.

Conspicuously absent from every list is the peavey, a 5-foot wooden lever that revolutionized logging in North America.

Historically made of white ash — a strong, lightweight, flexible hardwood — peaveys are capped with hardened steel and a swinging, curved hook on a spiked end. Since the hook bites into tree bark, lifting the end of the peavey’s wooden lever easily turns logs. Known as the lumberman’s all-purpose tool, the peavey is also used to tighten heavy logging chains, pry boulders beneath stumps, and in the days when logs floated downriver to mills, untangle log jams.

My introduction to the peavey first occurred in the 1950s when my twin brother Don and I spent school vacations and weekends on my maternal grandparents’ dairy farm in Mercer. Each winter, our grandfather harvested pine logs with a team of Belgium workhorses. As youngsters, Don and I would stand in front of the horses as a towering pine fell, showering us with “snowflakes.” We’d argue over whose turn it was to hustle forward on Grampa’s signal to hand him the peavey.

If his 16-foot pine logs’ butt ends had a slight twist, the peavey rotated them upward before the logs were encircled with a heavy logging chain. This simple maneuver, Grampa claimed, prevented butt ends from snagging on stumps, easing the horses’ burden of twitching a ton of logs to the barnyard.

A man of few words, our grandfather praised the peavey, claiming it was as important to loggers as the two-man crosscut saw, axe, and later, chainsaw. We listened with amazement to his tales of cutting wood with his workhorses in the north Maine woods during the winter of 1942. At his brother Ben’s logging camp near Spencer Lake, Grampa had taught German prisoners-of-war how to cut spruce pulpwood and roll logs with peaveys.

“Did the Germans try knocking you out with a peavey?” we asked him excitedly.

“Heavens no,” he replied with a chuckle. “They were just teenagers. Our country put them to work cutting pulpwood to keep the papermills running.”

The peavey’s meteoric appearance came in April 1857, when a logjam formed during the annual spring log drive on the Penobscot River. In Stillwater, a village 15 miles upriver of Bangor’s several hundred sawmills, a raging spring freshet had piled tree-length logs to a height of 40 feet. A crowd of horrified onlookers stood on the snowy bank and watched a dozen loggers in hobnailed boots scamper across floating logs toward the logjam.

Summoned by a river driver’s wife, an Old Town pastor arrived on horseback. Every 30 minutes, the pastor led the faithful in a prayer for the loggers risking their lives struggling to pry apart the logjam.

Joseph Peavey, a 58-year-old inventor, was among the anxious crowd. Prostrate in a covered bridge, he peered through the floorboard gaps at log drivers futilely working to free the tangled timber with ineffective wooden poles. Inspired by a potential solution, Peavey hustled to his nearby blacksmith shop and began forging a tool to aid the log drivers. Within an hour, he handed a five-foot wooden pole, capped with a steel-hinged hook, to log-drive supervisor William Hale, who somehow got it to a river driver out on the logjam.

The new-fangled tool worked. As the jam broke, the trailing river driver reached shore moments before he would have been swept downriver under a torrent of floating logs. Safely on shore, amid the roar of whitewater and crashing logs, the jubilant lumberjack yelled to Hale, “Has she got a name?” Hale hollered something back, but the only discernable word was “peavey.” The name stuck.

By mid-afternoon Hale was speaking in glowing terms about Joseph Peavey, crediting his invention for breaking up the logjam and saving the lives of his men. The following day — a Sunday — the pastor who’d stood on shore praying for the river drivers attributed Peavey’s invention to divine intervention.

From Bangor (the lumber capital of the world in 1850) upriver to scattered outposts in Maine’s vast, virgin woodlands, bateaux and ox wagons delivered dozens of peaveys to logging camps. A decade later, the indispensable tool was a common implement in Oregon’s earliest logging camps. In today’s high-tech lumbering industry, feller bunchers have largely replaced chainsaws, axes, and wedges.

The peavey, though, remains a fixture among North American lumbermen.

In “Holy Old Mackinaw,” a 1938 treatise on early American lumberjacks, author Stewart Holbrook wrote, “It was accounted a mild disgrace to lose one’s peavey on the (river) drive, and old-time river bosses deducted its cost from a man’s wages. Thus, when a (river) driver tumbled into a stream, his cynical fellows would shout, ‘Never mind the man, but be careful of the peavey.'”

With Hale and other river bosses publicly advocating for wider use of the peavey, Joseph Peavey’s smithy struggled to keep up with demand. Anticipating unprecedented business growth, the inventor submitted a patent application to the U.S. Patent Office. With his application completed and the peavey blueprint in hand, he began walking from his Old Town home to the nearest post office in Bangor. He stopped in Orono to visit a fellow blacksmith. The two friends celebrated the new tool by each drinking two glasses of Medford rum. After swigging a third glass, Joseph let down his guard by displaying his drawing and patent application. His friend poured another round of rum; Joseph drank it and promptly passed out.

When he awoke the next morning, a hangover was the least of his concerns. Peavey’s blueprint and patent application were on their way to Washington, D.C., under the name of his colleague.

Undeterred by his stolen patent, Joseph and his sons Daniel and Hiram pressed forward, improving the original design, and producing peaveys until orders overwhelmed their small Stillwater smithy. The Peavey family business moved to a larger building in nearby Orono. A few years later, when the business outgrew that building, it found a new home four miles upriver in Old Town, where craftsmen had for decades been producing bateaux for river drivers. (The Old Town Bateau Company, Peavey’s business neighbor, hosted a visit from Henry David Thoreau during his first trip to the Maine woods in 1846.)

When Joseph died in 1873, his Peavey Manufacturing Company had distinguished itself as an exemplary business with 90 employees. His obituary in the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, dated Aug. 23, listed his many inventions: hay press, stump puller, unspillable ink well, wooden screw device, clapboard waterwheel, shingle machine, and improved couplings for train cars. A modest man, Peavey’s obituary understated his remarkable achievements, “He possessed a fertile mind in the application of mechanical principles. Many of his inventions have become quite useful.”

During World War II, Peavey Manufacturing was purchased by the Buswell family and moved to Oakland, Maine — my hometown — where several mills along Messalonskee Stream were producing more axes, sickles, and scythes than any town in North America. Following a devastating plant fire in 1965, the company moved to its present home in Eddington, five miles east of the Penobscot River and 15 miles downriver of the tool’s birthplace in Stillwater.

With 36 full-time employees, the company is celebrating its 167th birthday in 2024. According to Rodney Buswell, Sr., president of Peavey Manufacturing Company, “Our peaveys are still forged and equipped with white ash handles, the same way Joseph Peavey made the first one in 1857. We make and sell about 15,000 peaveys annually. We’ve honored the Peavey family legacy by maintaining the company as a family-owned business.”

Rodney’s two sons, daughter, son-in-law, and wife all work at the Eddington plant.

The company ships peaveys around the globe, to loggers in Bangladesh and utility pole workers in Puerto Rico.

“Joseph Peavey,” Buswell told me, “built a universally-revered company whose stellar reputation endures. Several years ago, I ordered a machine part from a dealer in Kansas City. I asked the clerk on the phone if he was ready to write down my credit card number. The dealer replied, ‘Nah, I don’t need it. I’ll ship the invoice with the part. Peavey Manufacturing has been in business for more than 150 years. That tells me that you produce a good product and pay your bills. We’re good to go.’”

Ron Joseph, of Sidney, is author of “Bald Eagles, Bear Cubs, and Hermit Bill: Memories of a Maine Wildlife Biologist,” published by Islandport Press. 

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