Bear house? Lumber camp? Experts ponder origins of N.B.'s 'lunch box graveyard'

I was on a canoe trip with friends over the May long weekend, poking around our campsitealong theNepisiguitRiver deep in the northern New Brunswick wilderness, when one of usstumbled on the eerie sight now dubbed "the lunch box graveyard."

Piled high in a small forest glenbetweenPoppleDepot and IndianFalls Depot,more than 100 kilometres from the nearest town, is an incongruousjumble of rusted and decaying lunch boxes. They've clearly been there for decades, so old there's moss growing out of their leather handles.

My friend Sam Charters, an avid oudoorsman, placedone in his canoe while we completed our trip.Three days later I returned in a CBC vehicle.

The drive back alongtheNepisiguitto our campsite is close to two hours on gravel roads, with theoccasionalwashout. There's no cellphone signal and I'mmuch more likely to see a moose than a person.

When I startto document the "graveyard," I become very aware of the utter isolation. Every rustle of the surrounding woods is magnified, every snap of a branch turninginto an echoing "crack."

Digging up a pair of lunch boxes to take back to researchers, I make another discovery. Buried beneath the firstlunch box I pick up arefour more. I had first counted more than 100, but how many more have been swallowed up by the moist, mossy forest floor, I'll never know.

I bringtwo lunch boxes back with me.Onestill hasa tin cup insideitsrottedshell.Theirearthy, muddy, smell lingers inside my vehiclefor weeks after.

Expert opinion

I takethe lunch boxes to the New Brunswick MuseumArchives and Research Library in Saint John. Gary Hughes is the curator of history there, an expert in all things old and ancient in New Brunswick.

Herespondsimmediately to theirshape.

"Thisis a familiar form that lasted from the late part of the 19thcentury, well into the 20thcentury," he says. "They would appear to be obsolete now with the later types of materials that we use to produce lunch boxes, but it was a tried and true method. And to have these in profusion in a rural area of New Brunswickis quite fascinating."

Hughes estimates the lunch boxes weremade between 1890 and 1940. He's much more certain about their purpose.

"An industry! No question,and from something that is now obsolete both the lunch boxes and the industry," he says.

"And that scale of burial, there must be more under the ground, you're just looking at perhaps the tip of the iceberg."

With a rough timeframe,I can cross-reference the lunch boxes' age with the location of their discovery for more clues about their origin.

Joshua Green at the New Brunswick Provincial Archives gives me everything he is able to dig up about the area at that time.

"When we looked into the history of land usage right around that part of the Nepisiguit, we found that for a very long time, going back into the 19th century, there's a long history of timber leases," Green says."And the more we dug, we found many, many references really two kinds of land use which weresporting,includingfishing along the river and different types of lumber camps and depots."

An abandoned lumber camp was an early and obvious guess, given New Brunswick's long history of logging in the area. But a single historic note related to the mass storage and transport of food does seem to tie in well with the lunch box graveyard.

"In the mid-1920s there was a bear house located at that spot," Green says. "Abear house, or a bear camp, was just a log cabin or a small cabin constructed in the more remote places that were securedagainstbears,because the bears wanted to get the pork and beans and flour inside for the lumber camps."

It's the only possible answerwe have that links large supplies of food in the area to these lunch boxes during those years.But both Grass and Hughes admit that, as it stands, a bear camp is the best theory.

A definitive answer to the question ofwho dumped the lunch boxes in the woods and why still eludes us.