From the time of the first European settlements in the early 1600s, the lumber industry has been vital to the growth of the nation. Lumbering requires three basic components for sustained, long-term success: the availability of woodlands, the development of a market for forest products, and a means by which timber can be efficiently harvested and marketed. Through the 1930s, the history of the American lumber industry was largely one of lumbermen harvesting all the desirable timber in an area and then quickly moving on to the next area—all the while trying to keep costs to a minimum. This usually meant clear-cutting the land, moving lumber to market quickly and cheaply, and then selling or abandoning the land.

The ever-growing demand for more wood pushed lumbermen to continually improve harvesting and delivery methods. The technological improvements in saws and transportation developed to increase the output of the woods, in turn guaranteed a continual search for new timber supplies. Until the late 1800s, the ready availability of more woodland led many to believe the timber supply to be unlimited. But in the 1910s and 1920s, dwindling timber stocks and excessive production caused lumbermen to reassess how they did business, leading in some instances to cooperative efforts between private industry and government. With its tentative embrace of sustained-yield management and regeneration by the 1940s, the lumber industry signaled its willingness to adapt in order to assure future timber supplies.

The Northeast, comprised of New England plus New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware, was the center of America's early lumber industry. Lumbermen had to meet not only domestic demands, but also early industrial needs. Iron furnaces, which required huge quantities of wood charcoal to smelt ore, on average consumed 20,000 acres of forest over about a dozen years. Furnace operators found themselves competing with urban households for fuel wood. Besides wood for home construction, furnishings, and tools, it took between 10 and 20 acres of forest to supply the fuel burned by one home fireplace annually. By the 1780s, competition between iron furnaces and home consumption in urban areas had drawn farmers into the lumber supply trade. Farmers clearing land up to 100 miles away could profitably deliver lumber to urban markets, despite the expense and difficulties of transporting to market.

Regional and overseas trade developed soon after settlement. The first supply of New England white pine, used mostly for masts, reached England in 1634, and trade was well established within 20 years. Blessed with vast stands of highly coveted white pine, and good rivers and ports, Maine became the leading lumber producer in the years following the American Revolution. It sent white pine to Boston and other eastern port cities and competed directly with Canada's New Brunswick in exporting to the British colonies in the Caribbean. The fierce competition led to a brief armed standoff in 1839 between New Brunswick and Maine lumbermen in what became known as the Aroostook War. War was narrowly avoided, but the dispute has colored lumber trade relations with Canada, historically the largest exporter of lumber to the United States, ever since.

By 1820, though Maine outpaced all others in lumber production, its days as leader were already numbered. As settlers moved into western New York and Ohio, they turned to cheaper local supplies instead of importing lumber from back east. New York eclipsed Maine as the leading lumber producer by 1839, and Pennsylvania soon replaced New York as the lumber industry followed settlers westward. The Northeast led the nation in lumber production until 1879, when the lake states region overtook them.

As the lumber industry migrated west from the Northeast toward the Great Lakes in the mid- 1800s, lumbermen also harvested timber in the central states along the way. The central states (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Missouri) did not experience the spectacular rise and subsequent decline of production of the Northeast or the lake states because they lacked the large volume of valued softwood timber in those regions. From the mid-1800s until 1916, when the South surpassed it, the central states were the most productive hardwood region in the country (often around 90 percent of the region's production was in hardwoods).

Though the region contributed a small portion to the total lumber production for the nation, the central states have always been important to the transport and distribution of lumber. The upper Mississippi River and the Illinois-Michigan Canal, completed in 1847, provided the "highways" to move the rafts of logs and lumber and transformed the small town of Chicago into a booming trade town. The canal allowed Chicago wholesalers to sell Michigan and Canadian lumber to buyers in the prairie region for 50 percent less than eastern lumber. By 1856, Chicago had replaced Albany, New York, as the nation's leading wholesale lumber market.

As settlers pushed out onto the Great Plains, demand for wood tied the economies of the lake states and prairie regions together. The lake states region, consisting of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, also possessed white pine and, like New England, had an extensive waterway network by which to move timber. But the era of large-scale lumbering in the region was relatively brief. As the harvesting of the lake states forests accelerated, production hit its peak years in the 1870s and 1880s. Between 1869 and 1889, lumber production jumped from 3.6 billion board feet (one board foot is equal to one foot square by one inch thick) to nearly 10 billion board feet before starting to decline. It bottomed out in 1932 at 289 million board feet. It has since recovered, and in 2002, the three states produced nearly 1.6 billion board feet, or 3 percent of the national total.

It was in the lake states region that the buying and selling of land became integral to the lumber business. Starting in the 1860s, Frederick WEYERHAEUSER, Orrin H. Ingram, and other lumbermen made their fortunes by buying up forests, cutting the timber, and supplying it to the prairie farmers. Then they would sell the cutover land to newly arriving farmers before having to pay taxes on it. Lumbermen then moved on to the largely untouched forests of the South and the Pacific Northwest. In some cases, an entire companyowned logging camp—buildings and all—would be placed on railroad cars and moved to the next location.

Before large-scale lumbering got underway in the South in the 1870s and 1880s, the southern lumber industry mostly consisted of supplying live oak trees for shipbuilding and the production of naval stores. In fact, from the 1830s until the outbreak of the Civil War, naval stores (masts, turpentine, pitch tar, resin) had become almost as big as the COTTON INDUSTRY. In areas too poor for cotton farming, settlers often worked in the lumber and naval stores industries.

But the depletion of white pine stands in the Northeast and lake states led northern lumbermen to embrace southern yellow pine. Between 1890 and 1920, lumber production in the South rose from 1.6 billion board feet in 1880 to 15.4 billion board feet in 1920, peaking in 1912. The South was producing 37 percent of all the lumber of the United States during that time, and output continued to rise over the remainder of the century. In 2002, the region produced 21.58 billion board feet, or 46 percent of the nation's total output.

Repair work on an enormous cut-off saw at a lumber mill (FOREST HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

Federal laws such as the Weeks Act (1911) and the Clark-McNary Act (1924), which encouraged fire protection and scientific forest management on state and private lands, helped lay the foundation for the revitalization of the southern lumber industry. The development of a pulp industry based on southern pines during the 1930s provided the monetary incentive for private landowners and the timber industry to undertake forest management. The influx of wood-based industries to the region and the increasing value for pines led many lumbermen to embrace forest renewal and management practices on a widespread basis. Pine plantations for pulp production became big business and brought much-desired industry to the region by 1940. The dominant source of pulpwood since the 1940s, the South increased its share of production to more than three-quarters of the country's pulpwood in 1993. Within 40 years of implementing the Weeks Act, the amount of annual growth in the southern forest outpaced timber removal, though it should be noted that abandoned farmland reverting to forestland contributed to some of this recovery. Southern forests were not only recovering but also providing a model for reforestation efforts around the country.

In the 1880s, the lumber industry turned its attention not only to the South, but also to the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California. Because of the arid land and difficult terrain, the lumber industry largely by-passed the Rocky Mountain states of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico as it moved to the more productive forests of the Northwest. Production in the Rockies peaked in 1925, dropped during the Great Depression (as it did nationally), and rose again in the postwar construction boom. The lumber industry remains an important industry in Montana and Idaho, which together produced 6 percent of the nation's lumber in 2002.

When the continental railroads reached the West Coast in 1869, the land rush began on the Pacific coast. With the high cost of shipping timber back east by rail, it was initially more economical to sell the wood to regional markets or ship it overseas to South America and Asia. But once the Great Northern Railroad sharply slashed its freight rates in 1893, it became affordable to ship lumber back east. When production in the lake states region began to decline sharply soon thereafter, shipping lumber over 1,000 miles by rail finally became profitable for northwestern lumbermen. Although timber production rapidly increased, not until 1900 did a western state appear among the top 10 producers. By 1910, Washington and Oregon ranked first and third respectively among all states in production. Since 1940, Oregon, Washington, and California have consistently been among the top three producers. In 2002, they combined to produce 30 percent of all U.S. lumber.

Casting an eye toward the future, even before lumber production had started declining in the lake states, Frederick Weyerhaeuser and other lumbermen began buying forestland in the Pacific Northwest region. At one point his company held 1.9 million acres of land in the Northwest. The creation of federal forest reserves in the 1890s and early 1900s reduced available acreage and drove up prices, eventually leaving timber ownership concentrated in the hands of a few large companies.

With the continuing availability of more land until the 1920s and 1930s, it made little economic sense for lumber companies to hold cutover land and pay taxes on land of no value to them. Instead, companies either sold the land to settlers or let the government take it back instead of paying delinquent taxes. The 1920s, with no new lands to purchase, marked the end of the frontier phase of lumbering. Lumber companies began investigating and even undertaking sustainedyield management (regulating the annual amount of timber cut so it corresponded to the amount grown annually) and selective cutting of timber as a way to regenerate forests by the early 1930s. Even though tax laws made it more costly to replant than to buy mature timberlands, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company adopted policies of selective cutting and sustained yield and created one of the first industrial tree farms in 1941.

By regenerating the forest, major lumber companies cleared the way for a younger and more vigorous forest with an annual growth rate that would far exceed that of the original forest. In contrast, small local firms and independent lumbermen in the region hastily cut their timber to make a quick profit. The resulting overproduction drove down prices and forced many of these lumber companies out of business by the late 1920s. With most of the easily accessible timber harvested, only large timber companies could afford the machinery to open up and develop the interior regions.

The enormous size of the logs initially presented problems for sawmill operators in the Pacific Northwest. Consequently, many of the innovations in the lumber industry came out of that region. Steam-driven circular saws brought west from the Great Lakes and the South enabled the lumberjacks to cut more timber and at faster speeds, but they could not easily handle the mammoth logs. The introduction in the 1870s of double and even triple saws replaced circular saws, which could not cut more than half their diameter. A decade later the band saw replaced these earlier saws; its one continuous loop of blade could cut through an entire log.

Saw blade technology had to adapt because of technological advances in the woods. A pioneer working by himself and using a single-bitted axe could expect to clear 12 acres a year. Lumberjacks started using the long-handled, double-bitted axe widely after 1878. They combined that with the crosscut saw in the 1880s, dropping by nearly four-fifths the time it took to cut down a tree. The introduction of the gasoline-powered chainsaw in 1947 further sped up the process, and that was supplemented by machines such as fellers and harvesters that can clear several truckloads of timber per day.

To move logs to the mills, lumbermen began replacing oxen with the steam donkey engine in the mid-1880s. The engine used steel cables to drag, or skid, fallen timber and allowed lumbermen to remove larger logs at a faster rate. As technology permitted, ever-larger machines replaced those engines. The massive and complex water flume systems constructed to send lumber down water slides from upper elevations to the mills below were first replaced by RAILROADS and then, after the 1920s, by logging trucks. Truck logging had its greatest impact in Oregon because it opened up areas in the Cascade Mountains that could not economically be tapped by railroad logging. Areas untouched before World War II became accessible and economically feasible after the war because of warsurplus trucks. The use of trucks allowed most sawmills to remain at permanent sites, further lowering costs, and largely helped bring to an end the migratory nature of lumbering.

During the Great Depression, the bottom fell out of the national lumber market. Overproduction drove prices down and touched off a cycle of declining output and prices. William Greeley, David T. Mason, and George S. Long, all of whom had been instrumental in introducing scientific forest management in the Pacific Northwest, pushed for greater cooperation between private industry and the government in an attempt to equalize production and consumption. Concerned about the continual economic problem faced by lumber communities, Mason, a private forester and former U.S. Forest Service employee, argued that private companies should be able to combine public timberlands with adjacent private holdings to develop better management plans. Doing so would stabilize supply and demand. Mason's new definition of sustained yield became the cornerstone of the Sustained-Yield Forest Management Act (1944) and assisted several lumber towns in the West. The stability this provided made labor union organizing easier during the immediate and prosperous postwar period; later, mechanization and automation of all aspects of the production process, along with industry consolidation, brought worker layoffs and weakened the unions.

Under pressure from lumber companies and politicians not to impede economic prosperity after the war, the U.S. Forest Service continually raised the harvest limit in national forests over the next three decades. In the 1970s, the Forest Service argued that advancements in areas such as logging machinery and regeneration would allow it to intensively manage certain parts of a forest and produce higher amounts of timber through clear-cutting, while leaving other parts of the forest for recreational use. Continued controversy over clear-cutting led the federal government in the late 1980s and early 1990s to remove large areas of federally owned land in the West (the Rocky Mountain and Pacific coast states combined) from harvest. Many western mills dependent on federal timber were forced to reduce production dramatically or to close. The proportion of lumber produced from the West slowly fell to just under half by 1999 as a result of declining levels of timber from public lands and increasing levels of production in the South.

In 1990, the South became the nation's largest lumber producing region, accounting for 36 percent of all softwood lumber and 78 percent of all hardwoods. Of the region's 215 million forest acres, 89 percent is privately owned, which in part gives private industry the ability to increase lumber production. Total lumber production in the North (the northeast, central, and lake states combined) remained fairly steady from 1965 through the early 1990s but more than doubled to 10.2 billion board feet by 1999, nearly all of it in hardwood lumber production. This was largely the result of better forestry practices and more intensive use of remaining timber.

The drop in domestic production did not mean a reduction in consumption. The United States remains not only the largest producer but also the largest consumer of lumber in the world. To meet demand, lumber imports to the United States from all countries totaled 19.9 billion board feet in 1999 (93 percent of it from Canada), an all-time high. New nonresidential construction accounted for about 7 percent of lumber consumption, manufacturing for 12 percent, shipping (pallets, containers, and packing materials) for 10 percent, and 11 percent for all other uses. Overall, about 60 percent of lumber consumed in 1999 was used in housing construction.

The manufacturing of lumber and wood products has fallen from the fourth-ranked overall industry in 1900 in terms of dollar value to a ranking of 13th, within just the manufacturing sector, in 2000. The forest products industry employs approximately 1.7 million people in forest and paper production, or 1.1 percent of the U.S. workforce. Although lumber is no longer the dominant industry it once was, the lumber industry remains one of the nation's most vital and important industries, due in large part to the industry's willingness to adapt to changing economic and environmental conditions.

Further reading

• Andrews, Ralph W. Glory Days of Logging. Seattle: Superior Publishing Co., 1956. 
• Cox, Thomas R., et al. This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. 
• Williams, Michael. Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 

Jamie Lewis