(taken from National Museums of Canada document; "work in the Nineteenth-Century Forest Industry")
Squaring was a complex operation consisting of several stages:
- felling
- tracing a line with a cord blackened with soot to indicate the direction of the squaring
- scoring (i.e. chopping V-shaped notches every three or four feet) to facilitate squaring
- hewing to produce a flat edge (done by the most skillful axemen)
The operation was expensive, for it required straight trees without knots, 91 to 121 centimeters (three to four feet) in diameter, and at least 46 meters (150 feet) high. It is estimated that from 30 to 36 percent of every tree felled for squaring was lost. Furthermore, the tree was left to rot in the forest if it was discovered that the last side to be squared had too many knots. It is thus easy to understand that after 1850, the sawtimber market permitted better use of the trees, but not necessarily of the forest.
Shipbuilding flourished in Quebec and in the Maritime provinces until 1870. The first ships built were small and of doubtful quality, but by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Maritimes were building ships of more than 1500 tons and ranked fourth in the world in tonnage after Great Britain, France and the United States.
The construction of the ship required considerably more than a good foreman and experienced shipwrights; caulkers, sail makers, tar spreaders, rope makers, pulley makers, blacksmiths and even joiners were also needed. A flourishing shipbuilding industry can thus give life to various related activities.
