Lumber Industry

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LUMBER INDUSTRY

LUMBER INDUSTRY. The production of lumber, wood split or sawed for use as boards, beams, planks, and the like, has been a critical economic activity throughout American history. Whereas Indian peoples altered North America's woodlands through the extensive use of fire, European colonists introduced the first mass cuttings of trees for both trade and subsistence purposes. Although most felled trees were cut to provide firewood and to open fields for agriculture, timber products were important commodities for trade with Europe from the inception of British North America. Indeed, the Pilgrims' first shipment home in 1621 was dominated by milled wood for their comparatively timber-starved mother country. Lumber from North America was consumed and shipped to other British colonies and to Europe for a wide variety of uses, including barrel staves, building construction, furniture, and shingle manufacture. Colonial society was comparatively lumber rich. European travelers were often staggered by the colonists' unwillingness to use any but the finest of wood for even the most pedestrian purposes. As one observer wrote of eighteenth-century New Englanders:

The richest and straightest trees were reserved for the frames of the new houses; shingles were rived from the clearest pine; baskets, chair bottoms, cattle bows, etc., were made from brown ash butts; all the rest of the timber cleared was piled and burned on the spot.…All the pine went first. Nothing else was fit for building purposes in those days. Tables were 2½ feet wide from a single board, without knot or blemish.

The white pine, the largest of New England's trees, was the most important tree for export. Indispensable for ship masts and increasingly scarce in Europe, the pines were actively sought by the Royal Navy, which by the end of the seventeenth century mandated fines for unauthorized cutting of large specimens.

Because of their abundant stands of large white pine, Maine and New Hampshire were the most important commercial lumbering centers in colonial times. More than two dozen sawmills were in operation in southern Maine by the 1680s. Lumbermen used draft animals to pull downed trees over frozen winter ground to the nearest waterway, where they floated to sawmills in the spring. Although many logs were sawed by hand throughout the colonial period, New England's mills resorted to water-power more extensively than did their English counter parts.

The nineteenth century brought an intensification of lumbering as the new nation grew in size. For a time, Maine held its dominant position in the industry. By one estimate, Bangor was the world's largest lumber-producing site in the early nineteenth century. But soon the industry began to move westward on the "timber frontier" in search of relatively unharvested forests, particularly the still valuable white pine. By 1840, upstate New York and Pennsylvania had supplanted northern New England as the largest producers of lumber. In the 1850s, lumbermen began cutting the large pine forests of the Great Lakes states, and by 1880, Michigan produced more lumber than any other state. White pine remained the single most important commercial tree in the nineteenth century, accounting for about half of all lumber sawed each year through the 1870s. By the early twentieth century, however, the enormous redwood, pine, and fir forests of the Far West and the South's piney woods provided most of the nation's lumber. While different regions produced their own owners, firms, and laborers, many New Englanders moved westward with the industry and continued to wield disproportionate influence over it well into the twentieth century. At the height of the Great Lakes white pine harvest, for example, four-fifths of the 131 most influential lumber entrepreneurs hailed from the northeastern United States or eastern Canada, as did many of their most experienced laborers.

The nineteenth century lumber industry was part and parcel of the industrialization of the United States. Before the widespread use of coal after the Civil War, wood likely supplied more than 90 percent of the nation's energy needs for heat, light, and rail and steamship transportation. Rapid population growth on the timber-poor Great Plains helped make timber production a true industry, with operators harvesting and milling wood near the Great Lakes and shipping wood to build homes in Kansas and Nebraska. The burgeoning railroad network made such transportation possible even as it increased demand for timber. Railroads needed lumber to construct rail cars, stations, fences, and cross ties in addition to the massive amounts of wood they burned for fuel. Each year railroads needed some 73 million ties for the construction of new rail lines and the maintenance of old ones, estimated by the magazine Scientific American in 1890. From the 1870s to 1900, railroads used as much as a fourth of national timber production. The mining industry similarly used large amounts of lumber to support underground diggings and to maintain its own rail beds. Indeed, many mining companies ran their own local logging and sawing operations.

The internal structure of the lumber industry changed to meet these economic circumstances. Individuals and families had operated single sawmills to make lumber of

raw logs, either for the direct use of the log provider or for sale to wholesalers. In the 1850s, many operators began buying multiple mills, acquiring their own timberlands, and operating their own lumberyards in market centers such as Chicago. The rise of the Weyerhaeuser timber company epitomized this consolidation. Starting in 1860 with a single sawmill on the Mississippi River in Rock Island, Illinois, the German immigrant Frederick Weyerhaeuser directed the energies of some 20,000 employees a decade later. By the early twentieth century, he and his business partners owned more than 2 million acres of forest and perhaps 15 billion feet of valuable pine. The "lumber king," a private man in comparison with other industrial giants of the era, may have been the world's richest man by his death in 1914.

Consolidating ownership led to other changes in the production and marketing of timber. Operations like Weyerhaeuser's had significant advantages over their smaller and less-capitalized competitors. The exhaustion of timber stands near waterways large enough to drive lumber created the need for railroad spurs to connect inland sawmills to the national rail network. The companies that constructed their own rail lines, an expensive proposition, were for the first time also able to ship mass quantities of hardwoods, especially oak, hickory, ash, and maple, all of which were too heavy to easily float, to market, allowing for a more intensive and profitable cutting of woodlands.

Away from the timber harvest sites, corporate lumberyards began sorting lumber into standardized categories to ensure higher prices for finer products. By the 1890s, regional grading schemes were in place. Firms in urban timber markets began shipping manufactured building components, such as doors and sashes and in some cases entire structures, as early as the 1860s. Standardization and reliable transportation by rail allowed for the extensive use of the distinctly American "balloon-frame" construction technique, in which light, mass-produced boards were nailed together to create a strong building skeleton. The balloon frame allowed fewer and less-skilled workers to follow easily repeatable plans in the erection of even large buildings.

After the Civil War, the production of lumber thus became a modern and highly specialized industry. In Chicago, the nation's largest lumber market, for example, twelve miles of docks were devoted exclusively to unloading lumber. Enormous piles of stacked wood dominated entire blocks of the city. "The timber yards are a considerable part of the city's surface," wrote a British traveler, "there appearing to be enough boards and planks piled up to supply a half-dozen states." The city's lumber wholesaling was such an important business that by 1880 its operators owned several times more capital than did all of Chicago's banks combined.

The very size of the industry raised the prospect that it would cut over the nation's woodlands, leaving nothing of value to replace the once majestic pine forests. As early as 1876 the Canadian lumber entrepreneur James Little argued that those cutting the Great Lakes forests were "not only burning the candle at both ends…but cutting it in two, and setting the match to the four ends to enable them to double the process of exhaustion." In the next three decades, the spread of such fears, reflected in increasing prices and decreasing sawlog size, prompted the development of professional forestry and the creation of what became the national forest system. Although federal lands never accounted for more than one-fifth of the national timber harvest, their existence reflected the concern that private enterprise was unable to use timber resources on a sustainable basis.

The industry's rapid growth also created a large demand for labor. Logging itself remained a winter activity until the twentieth century. Work crews, consisting largely of farmers idled by the season, moved into place in late fall and early winter, working until spring thawed the waterways and called them home to plant their fields. Before the Civil War, crews consisted of around a dozen men, but the postwar florescence gave rise to camps of as many as several hundred. Loggers lived amidst the trees to be harvested, generally in temporary wooden structures. Their isolation and the perennial cash flow problems for the still seasonal cutting meant that many were paid in company store scrip or abruptly were fired in economic downturns and periods of low stumpage price. Work in the mills and yards was year-round by contrast. By the dawn of the twentieth century, immigrants made up most of the lumber industry's workforce. Large waves of strikes swept through timber country in the 1910s, resulting in sporadic wage increases and amelioration of working conditions. Organized labor secured an institutional presence in the industry in the 1930s and 1940s.

The development of new technologies created some changes in the nature of timber labor. Sawmills became increasingly mechanized. In the early nineteenth century, the machine-driven circular saw replaced the water-driven "muley saw," but the circular saw was replaced later by the more efficient and more expensive band saw, essentially a giant chainsaw fixed in place. The process of logging continued to rely on axes and handsaws to fell trees well into the twentieth century, until the post–World War II mass adoption of portable chainsaws. Trucks and forest roads allowed the cutting of less accessible areas, especially in the mountainous West. In the last decades of the century, the most heavily capitalized logging outfits began using large machines able to cut trees, delimb them, and stack them for transport to the mill. With such equipment, loggers were able to cut ten times more stumpage than their predecessors.

In the twentieth century, the lumber industry lost most of its frontier characteristics. Although Alaskan forests began to produce large volumes of timber, the exhaustion of most of the continent's uncut woods forced companies to make already-cut lands productive again. Remaining stands of old-growth forest were still lucrative targets for cutting, but by the 1960s, federal lands policies and environmentalist opposition removed many of these tracts from timber harvesting. Forest nurseries, tree farms, and reforestation efforts became essential to the industry's survival. Indeed, in the South intensively managed tree plantations largely replaced the management of natural forests for timber production. Moreover new wood products, such as pulp for paper manufacture, plywood, and wood fibers for wallboard and insulation, allowed companies to shift their focus from cutting large softwoods such as the white pine to using a much greater variety of trees, particularly the species that replaced pines in the most heavily cut regions. At the end of the twentieth century, the Southeast and Northwest were the most important lumber-producing regions, and imports accounted for nearly one-third of national softwood consumption.