The Base closed after the war and Roy was able to secure some obsolete wartime wooden structures for re-purposing.  He hauled the modest buildings down to Bridgewater and linking them together he created the barrel mill.  In the heavy snow country of Northern Maine one might well have questioned the wisdom of frugal wartime measures aimed at conserving materials.  However, the 2”x4” rafters spaced on thirty-inch-centers and the planed 1”x6” stringers miraculously served their purposes for decades, long past what anyone could have imagined reasonable.

     An enormous inventory of Ash hoops were always stored ahead in a nearby Barrel Mill shed.  The Ash hoops themselves were split and hand shaved by independent, skilled members of area Mi’kmaq and Maliseet tribes.   First, the workers would head into local swamps and cut down 6 ½-foot poles from Brown Ash trees.  The sought after ideal diameter of Ash poles were from trees the diameter of a glass bottle of Coca-Cola.  The best hoops came from the bottom tree sections which had thick, soft bark.  Enough Ash poles would be cut to fill a car’s trunk and the accumulated weight was such that the car’s rear end sagged considerably under the load.

      Once home, the hoop-makers would use metal wedges to split the poles into quarters.  Homemade four-legged shaving benches featured a seat to sit down on and a pivoting foot-operated-dog which clamped down the hoop stationary while a sharp drawknife was used to carefully shave down and finish the hoop.   The vast majority of the hoops used by Coopers were expertly and skillfully made. 

      Occasionally a joker would mix in inferior hoops split from poles located too high in the Ash tree trunk, where the diameter had become too small and the bark was young, smooth and hard.  These loser hoops were the bane of the piece-rate Coopers.   Either they’d break on a knot in the hoop bender, get mangled in the Cooper’s foot-operated hoop-notch-guillotine, or snap in half when being pounded home on a barrel by a Cooper’s adze and hoop-pounder-tool.

    Whenever a hoop-maker brought in his trunk-load of hoops, the terms of the deal were clear:  Roy would buy all the hoops, and pay cash then and there.  This reliable Ash-hoop-economy had been developed with old-school trust and unwavering reliability to the closely-woven community of hoop-makers.   With hoops spilling out from car trunks, the hoop-makers often arrived in jalopies in rough shape, many of them bearing New Brunswick license plates.    Broad hints indicated that many of these craftsmen lived on the economic edge.   For decades, every hoop-maker far and near knew that if they ever needed to generate a quick couple of hundred bucks, they could earn it in a week of hard work by cutting poles, splitting and shaving hoops and showing up at Roy’s doorstep for an immediate fistful of cash.

     By the early 1970s Roy had aged into retirement.  The Barrel Mill changed hands a couple of times in this new era.  During the 70s, the bigger farmers were shifting over to big machine Potato harvesters and bulk-body Potato trucks.  The smaller farmers were getting left behind and ‘getting done’ in that many were dropping out of growing Potatoes entirely.  With demand for Potato Barrels declining, the competing barrel mills, one by one, were closing their doors until Bridgewater Barrel was last man standing.  Turning a profit in the Potato Barrel business was much harder now. Expenses came under heightened scrutiny.

      Word about the closure spread like wild fire through the community of hoop-makers on both sides of the border.   When the shaved Ash hoop inventory was sufficiently depleted, the word was put out that Bridgewater Barrel was again buying Ash hoops.   However, the system had been broken.  Essentially,  no one ever showed up again to sell hand-shaved Ash hoops.

Changing World

     Facing an existential barrel crisis, Percy Milbury, the Barrel Mills Canadian millright rigged up machines to saw out and roll hoops made from Elm (“L-Umm”) planks.  These sawn Elm hoops worked OK if they were made from clear wood, free of knots.  However, Dutch Elm Disease was raging and the area’s Elm trees were dying.  So this lumber supply was endangered and disappearing fast.  Sawn White Oak hoops were tried and while they looked pretty they were weak and brittle for the rugged and unyielding mistreatment of Potato barrels in a Potato field.  Sawn White Ash hoops fared a little bit better, but the fact was well-known, no sawn hoop ever possessed the strength and durability of hand-shaved Brown Ash hoops.