"These days you don't know whether to admit you were a logger or not." -- Curley Chittenden, 1990.

Born in 1913, Curley Chittenden first learned about logging as a boy by helping his father to horse log near Bradner in the Fraser Valley. He worked for M&T Logging on Harrison Lake in the mid-1930s. With Vedder Logging, he worked as a loader operator on Vedder Mountain and at Chehalis. He and Ward Snider operated their own Snider & Chittenden Logging outfit on Harrison Lake in the 1950s and 1960s. Also a former musician, he co-wrote and co-published two excellent illustrated histories of logging and sawmilling with Arnold M. McCombs, a retired forestry engineer who was also an Agassiz-Harrison alderman. First they collaborated on The Harrison-Chehalis Challenge (Treeline Publishing, 1988), a history of the forest industry around Harrison Lake and the Chehalis Valley. It was followed by The Fraser Valley Challenge (Treeline Publishing, 1990), a history of logging and sawmilling in the Fraser Valley. Chittenden's grandfather, Captain Newton Chittenden, who published two of B.C.'s first travel books in 1882 and 1884, was the first white man to extensively explore the interior of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Curley Chittenden said he kept 'yapping at' both Joe Garner and Ivan Ackery to write their memoirs--both eventually did.

[BCBW 2003] "Forestry"