New Hampshire: Old timer of the White Mountains passes away

Nine years ago this month that I was privileged to oversee production
of a special supplement to The Courier newspaper of Littleton. This
32-page special edition of the century-old paper celebrated the life
and times of the western White Mountains during the 20th century and
covered many aspects of North Country life, including several features
related to one of many favorite topics, that being the White Mountain
National Forest. The reason I bring up this retrospective nearly a
decade later is because one of the special persons I interviewed for a
story that appeared in the supplement recently passed away at the age
of 93. That man, Louis B. Derosia, to this day remains one of my
favorite interviewees of all time. Derosia, a Haverhill, New
Hampshire, native who spent the better part of the last 60 years of
his life residing at his modest little home on West Main Street in
Littleton, fascinated me because of his long association with the
mountains and forests of the region. Beginning with a three-year stint
(1935-1937) with the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC),
Derosia spent more than 35 years working the woods of the region, and
was a longtime U. S. Forest Service worker who did everything from
fighting fires and rescuing lost and injured hikers to manning various
fire lookout towers all across the White Mountains.

With the CCC,
while stationed at their camp in Warren, N.H., Derosia drove truck,
worked in the camp blacksmith shop, and learned all about log
scaling.”This latter skill helped him get a job with the Forest
Service once his CCC enlistment was up,” I wrote back in December
1999. Among his first jobs with the Forest Service was working on a
timber sale near Sugarloaf Mountain in Benton., where he measured cut
logs. As someone who has long had an interest in local history—
especially when it comes to the White Mountains — I remember being
particularly enthralled with Derosia’s stories about working on the
White Mountain National Forest during the last years of the logging
railroad era and in the wake of the devastating Hurricane of 1938,
which laid to waste millions of board feet of timber all across New
Hampshire. Again, here’s what I wrote about Derosia nine years ago:
“In the wake of the… Hurricane of 1938… Derosia found himself
working for several summers in the East Branch country of the
Pemigewasset River in Lincoln. Here, he patrolled the woods still
being logged by Parker Young Company and served as part-time lookout
on the short-lived fire tower atop Hancock Spur, a 3,900-foot peak
high above the East Branch and Cedar Brook valleys.” Derosia told me
how he and his supervisor, Fred Gilman, were responsible for
patrolling much of the area that is now part of the
federally-designated Pemigewasset Wilderness. This area was closed off
to camping in the aftermath of the hurricane and it was their job to
see that the woods remained fire-free. Often this entailed day-long
walking patrols of 15 miles or more into the North Fork region, the
Shoal Pond and Zealand Notch areas, and the higher slopes of Mounts
Bond and Guyot. Though I never went back to visit Mr. Derosia again
after our congenial chat during the fall of 1999, I always thought of
him every time I drove past his home on West Main Street. And though
my time spent with him was all too short, it was unforgettable and
will always be with me.
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081228/GJSPORTS_01/712285025/-1/FOSSPORTS

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