Lumbering

Lumbering. From the early Colonial Era, European settlers tapped North America's forests. Initially, lumbering was more an adjunct of farming than an industrial activity. In the early eighteenth century, however, a primitive lumber industry arose land in northern New England. By 1830, Bangor, Maine, was the world's largest lumber‐producing center, supplying markets along the Atlantic seaboard and in Europe.

In the mid‐nineteenth century, lumbering flourished in Pennsylvania and New York. Williamsport, Pennsylvania, became the new leader in production. There in 1872 the industry's first great strike occurred, its failure hastening the collapse of the National Labor Union. The Erie Canal opened new opportunities. Vast quantities of lumber went eastward over it, especially from Saginaw and Bay City, Michigan, which by the 1880s had come to primacy as producers. Albany, New York, the canal's eastern terminus, became the nation's major wholesale lumber mart.

As settlement pushed westward, the industry followed. Chicago became a distribution center, production expanded into Wisconsin, and large mills arose that served markets down the Mississippi River and on the Great Plains. In the upper Midwest, Frederick Weyerhaeuser and his associates created the industry's largest enterprise.

Lumbering lagged in the antebellum South owing to natural barriers. However, a few centers emerged that catered to markets in New Orleans and in the Caribbean sugar islands. With extensive railroad construction following the Civil War, the southern pine industry burgeoned. Much of its expansion derived from northern capital and leadership. At Bogalusa, Louisiana, for example, Pennsylvania's Goodyear brothers in 1904 built the world's largest sawmill.

In the early twentieth century, many companies transferred to the Far West, competing with older mills that had arisen following California's Gold Rush, while continuing to serve midwestern markets by rail.

In the late nineteenth century, operators in the South and Far West had turned increasingly to timberland acquisition to ensure stable supplies of logs and to justify investments in logging railroads, ever more necessary as stands near floatable streams disappeared. Earlier lumbermen had put nearly all their investment capital into production facilities (and, in the West, into ships to carry their output), but this no longer sufficed. The need to acquire timberland, combined with expensive technological advances, fostered bigger enterprises, yet the industry remained highly fragmented. Bulky, abundant raw material, still relatively simple technology, and ease of entry discouraged centralization. Repeated efforts at cooperation or consolidation failed.

By the end of World War II, private timber holdings in the West had been heavily cut. With no new forested frontiers available, lumbermen turned to the national forests for logs. This led to changes in the National Forest Service, previously largely a custodial agency, and to clashes with environmentalists, who extolled the noncommodity values of forests. Partly in response, some producers shifted back to the South, where new forests had grown and most timber was on private land more insulated from environmentalist pressure. Declining per capita lumber consumption and rising demand for more sophisticated wood products accompanied these shifts and encouraged consolidation anew, but as the twentieth century ended the industry remained decentralized and fragmented.
See also Conservation Movement; Environmentalism; Forest and Forestry; Labor Movements; Land Policy, Federal.

Bibliography

Thomas R. Cox et al. , This Well‐Wooded Land, 1985.
Michael Williams , Americans and Their Forests, 1989.

Thomas R. Cox