Some of the ruins found on this unnamed island are iron hoops and giant chains used by tugboats for attaching booms. The tugboats utilized these booms to direct and move logs down the river towards Ottawa.
"The log drive on the river itself is almost as old as the settlements which flank it. The movement of logs was an important local industry, employing many tugs and hundreds of men to break the jams in the rapids and unsnag the wayward pieces caught on the shore. Every one of the millions of logs used to be branded with the mark of the company owning it. At Gatineau Point, until the 1960s, rivermen on long booms sorted them out according to owners, nudging each individual log into the appropriate channel for its mill. With the decision of Eddy's no longer to use the Gatineau, that process became unnecessary. When the dams were built at Low and Farmer's Rapids a slide more than a mile long was needed to guide every log past the long obstruction. The picture changed with rising labour costs after the Second World War. Serious consideration was given to abandoning the river route in favour of chipping at the logging camps, with the chips being carried by truck or by truck and rail to the mills on the Ottawa River. The sudden escalation of world oil prices changed that idea before it began, and the hasty abandonment of the rail line above Wakefield in the mid-1980s ended forever the prospect of using freight cars." GATINEAU VALLEY HISTORICAL SOCIETY - GVHS Location ID #BR0057
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