Lumbering was a significant part of the Adirondack economy in this time period. In the days of the residential lumber camp, women found jobs as cooks in the isolated communities. The camp cook didn't have all the duties of homemakers elsewhere -- few had to do the men's laundry and mending was contracted separately -- but she did have to cope with the lack of female companionship and primitive living conditions.

A homemaker going into the lumber woods didn't need to learn new job skills, but she had to be able to multiply her favorite recipes by six or eight times or more. Some cooks had husbands who lived with them and worked in the woods or around the camp. A few were widows supporting children, while others had never married.

I used to get up at four-thirty. You know they iced the roads in the woods, and sometimes I would hear the men going out to spray them at two-thirty. I had a little room off the cook shack for a bedroom . . .

In the cook shack we had two great big cook stoves, and there was a big chunk stove, too . . . They'd have panny cakes for breakfast and fried potatoes and eggs, sometimes ham, and sometimes bacon. They always had doughnuts and coffee in the morning . . . I'd melt the drippings on top of the stove in a pan, and I'd break the eggs in a dish and slide them in the pan until the pan was full and then put that in the oven. Twelve dozen eggs every morning. Those men would eat anywhere from six eggs to two dozen eggs apiece. We had a couple of men over there that ten, twelve, pork chops was nothin' for 'em.

Bea Holiday
near West Canada Lake, New York ca. 1920

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