Paulson family

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Charlie Paulson, Logger

by Bonny Remple

In 2005, Palling resident Charlie Paulson received his first Faller’s Certificate, not unusual in a community with a forestry-based economy, except that he was eighty years old at the time.

Now eighty-one, he continues to log. In fact, the day before I talked to him, he’d fallen some trees for a local couple and had spent the winter working as a faller for his son, Chris.

Charlie is a soft-spoken, slender man who wears jeans and a plaid jacket and looks considerably younger than his age. When asked how long he’d been logging, he replied that he’d started when he was in his teens. However his wife, Jean, reminded him that he’d actually been cutting down trees since he was eight years old. As with many of the early settlers in the Central Interior, Charlie started working at such an early age out of necessity.

Charlie Paulson with son Rick in 1963

(Photos courtesy of the Paulson family)

Charlie was born in Sweden in 1925 but his family immigrated to Canada only two years later, settling in the Lakes District. After hacking ties at Rose Lake for a time, Charlie’s father purchased a farm in Palling, west of Burns Lake.

Two years later, tragedy struck the young family when Charlie’s father drowned in Decker Lake, leaving his wife, Julia, alone to raise their four children. Charlie, who was only eight at the time, was the eldest. Because the family was still paying Sievert Anderson for their farm, Sievert suggested that Julia take a smaller home in trade rather than struggle to work and try to run the farm. That cabin was located in Decker Lake, on the lakeshore, near what is now known as Rowland Drive.

Julia worked as a house cleaner and did other odd jobs, earning about one dollar a day to support her family. To help her, son Charlie used a Swedish saw or snab saw to cut down trees for firewood. Although he helped his mother, he was also able to attend school in Palling. The original school in that community was a small poplar log cabin located about a kilometre west of the new school. Every second Sunday, the old school was also used as a church. (The “new” school, at the junction of Palling Road and Hutter Road, still stands today and is now a community hall.)

Decker Lake school, 1930's - Jean and Mary Paulson are the two girls with dark hair in the back row.

“There was a barn beside (the school) for our horses. We rode horses to school,” Charlie remembers. “And there was a swamp where we used to play. There were lots of willows and hundreds of wild rabbits. I was the janitor there. I got paid five dollars a month to haul water and wood to the school.”

From the little school in Palling, Charlie went on to attend the school in Decker Lake. After completing Grade 8 there, Charlie went to work full time. His first job was hacking ties on the far shore of Decker Lake. He was fifteen years old when he went to that camp.

Hacking ties was hard, physical labour. All the work was done by hand at that time. “After working in camp all winter, you were in good shape,” Charlie says. The finished ties were piled on the lakeshore then pushed out onto the frozen lake and surrounded by boom logs to keep them together. In the spring, the ties were floated across Decker Lake to a jack ladder. Tie loaders carried the ties from the jack ladder and loaded them onto railroad cars for the Canadian National Railway.






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