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The History of the Lumber Industry in the United States spans the period from European settlement through the twentieth century, throughout which lumber production was a major industry. Since forests from the Old World had been logged for centuries prior to the first arrival of colonists in British North America, the abundance of old-growth forests in the New World was unprecedented. The easily available timber proved an incredible resource to early settlers, with both domestic consumption and overseas trade fueling demand. The industry expanded rapidly and robustly as Americans logged their way across the country. By the end of the nineteenth century, of the 5,200 billion board feet of standing American forest first encountered by the colonists, less than 2,800 remained.

Colonial Era
The lumber industry was originally centered in New England, especially Maine and New Hampshire, largely due to the profusion of white pines, which were critical to shipbuilding. During the 1680's, over two dozen sawmills operated in southern Maine. Early loggers were dependent on water to move lumber to mills, accomplished by dragging felled trees to a river via a team of oxen floating the timber to its destination. Many mills further relied on water access as they were water powered, although a substantial portion of lumber was hand sawed during this era as well. Much of the lumber prior to the American Revolution was exported to England, which especially valued white pines as ship masts for the Royal Navy.

Nineteenth Century
By the 1790's, New England was exporting 36 million feet of pine boards and 300 ship masts annually, with over 75 percent coming from Massachusetts (which included Maine) and another 20 percent coming from New Hampshire. By 1830, Bangor, Maine had become the worlds largest lumber shipping port, and would movie over 8.7 trillion board feet of timber over the following sixty years.

The American industrial revolution caused the national demand for timber to spike. Prior to the Civil War, more than ninety percent of the nation's energy came from wood, fueling the great transportation vehicles of the era. As Americans settled the timber-starved Great Plains, they needed to import material with which to build their cities. The burgeoning railroad industry accounted for a fourth of the national lumber demand, required the product to build rail cars and stations, fashion ties, and power trains. Even as the coal began to replace wood as an energy source, the coal mining industry itself needed lumber to support its mining structures and create its own rail beds.

Technological development helped the industry meet the soaring demand. New methods of transporting lumber, like the steam engine, provided the means to log further inland and away from water. New machines such as the circular saw and the band saw allowed forests to be felled with significantly improved efficiency. The resulting increased timber production saw New England forests become rapidly depleted, and American loggers began methodically cutting their way south and west in search of new forests. By 1840, upstate New York and Pennsylvania were the seat of the industry. By 1880 the Great Lakes region dominated logging, with Michigan producing more lumber than any other state.

Twentieth Century
By 1900, with timber supplies in the upper Midwest already dwindling, American loggers looked further west to the Columbia basin. The shift west was sudden and precipitous: in 1899, Idaho produced 65 million board feed of lumber, in 1910, it produced 745 million. By 1920, the Pacific Northwest was producing 30 percent on the nation's lumber.

Whereas previously individuals or families were managing single sawmills and selling the lumber to wholesalers, towards the end of the nineteenth century this industry structure began to give way to large industrialists that owned multiple mills and purchased their own timberlands. None was bigger than Frederick Weyerhauser and his company, who started in 1860 in Rock Island, Illinois and expanded to Washington and Oregon. By the time he died in 1914, his company owned over 2 million acres of pine forest.

As old-growth forest disappeared rapidly, the United States' timber resources ceased to appear limitless. Canadian lumberman James Little remarked in 1876 that the rate at which the Great Lakes forests were being logged 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." The Division of Forestry was established in 1885, and in 1891 the Forest Reserve Act passed, setting aside large tracts of forest as Federal land. Loggers were forced to make already cut lands productive again, and the reforesting of timberlands became integral to the industry. Some loggers pushed further northwest to Alaskan forests, but by the 1960's most of the remaining uncut forest became protected.

The portable chain saw and other technological developments helped drive more efficient logging, but the proliferation of other building materials in the twentieth century saw the end of the rapidly rising demand of the previous century. In 1950, the United States produced 38 billion board feet of lumber, and that number remained fairly constant throughout the decades moving forward, with the nation production at 32.9 billion board feet in 1960, and 34.7 billion board feet in 1970.