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Woods Wisdom

Notes From All Over

By: Jim Petersen

“The lesson this situation should bring home to us is the need of restoring the forest industry. Our forests should be nurtured so as to serve the generations to come as they did the generations that are past. To this end, the people of Minnesota must shape their plans. Only thoughtful planning and careful management over a long period of time can again make productive the forest lands of the white pine region.”

History of the White Pine Industry in Minnesota, Agnes Larson, Professor of History and Chairman of the Department of History, St. Olaf College, University of Minnesota Press, 1949

Actor Kent Johnson aboard his replica wanigan at the Forest History Center in Grand Rapids. Floating wanigans doubled as cook and supply shacks during log drives. Before roads replaced rivers, water was the primary means for moving logs from remote logging camps to mills. During the tourist season, actors like Mr. Johnson provide visitors with a rare and historic look at the dangers 19th century loggers faced daily. For anyone wanting to learn more about the early days of Minnesota’s logging and milling industries, the Center is an outstanding public resource.

Fifteen miles northeast of St. Paul, at Marine on the St. Croix—the first white settlement in Minnesota—the Marine Lumber Company made history on August 24, 1839. Using waterpower diverted from the fast moving St. Croix River, it cut the first commercial saw log ever milled in Minnesota. History does not record the species, but it is assumed that it was a white pine cut from river’s edge.

Sixty-seven billion board feet later, on October 9, 1929, history was made a second time. The giant Virginia and Rainy Lumber Company—the largest white pine sawmill ever built in Minnesota—cut its last log. One long blast from the mill’s steam whistle and it was over—or so it seemed.

In a very real sense, the tiny Marine Lumber Company and the mighty Virginia and Rainy Lumber Company form the bookends for most of Minnesota’s history. Their years span not only the history of the state’s legendary timber industry, but also the histories of four more great industries, each built from white pine: flour milling, machinery, railroading and banking.

It is all exquisitely documented in the late Agnes Larson’s seminal 1949 doctoral thesis: History of the White Pine Industry in Minnesota. Decade by decade, she brings to “The lesson this situation should bring home to us is the need of restoring the forest industry. Our forests should be nurtured so as to serve the generations to come as they did the generations that are past. To this end, the people of Minnesota must shape their plans. Only thoughtful planning and careful management over a long period of time can again make productive the forest lands of the white pine region.” History of the White Pine Industry in Minnesota, Agnes Larson,  Professor of History and Chairman of the Department of History, St. Olaf College, University of Minnesota Press, 1949 life the people and events that shaped early Minnesota in an image remaining remarkably unchanged 161 years after the telling begins. Then as now, technology and capital were the real driving forces—forces in whose absence white pine could never have been exploited. Circular saws replaced primitive water-powered saws, increasing daily production from 5,000 board feet to 4,000 feet per hour. Powerful steam-driven carriages flipped logs from one flat-sawn side to the next replacing men who did the turning by hand. Edging machines transformed crudely sawn boards into concisely measured lumber. Kiln dryers condensed the time it took to move lumber from mill to market, reducing the cost of capital, and hot ponds kept logs from freezing in winter, allowing the cutting to go on year-round.

But technology exacted a steep price. Between 1870 and 1890, the cost of building a sawmill increased five-fold. The Virginia and Rainy mill, completed in 1908, cost its principal owners—Frederick Weyerhaeuser and Edward Hines—$10 million. In 1949, historian Larson would write that she was not sure which came first—increased competition or increased milling efficiency. Either way, the outcome was the same: mills got bigger and there were more of them.

By 1870, there were 207 sawmills in Minnesota, including 13 at Minneapolis, all driven by the Mississippi power of St. Anthony Falls. And by 1876 rough cut lumber was being “dressed” at 17 Minneapolis factories—made into doors, blinds, flour and pork barrels, boats, furniture and planking for sidewalks. Adding to demand, in 1887 the City of Minneapolis bought 6 million board feet of sidewalk planks, which it then used to extend the city’s boardwalk—by 67 miles.

Boise Cascade procurement forester Craig Halla (right) and Jim Hebner, Minnesota land and timber manager, amid a 20-foot- tall stand of 4-year-old hybrid poplar. These trees will be 60 feet tall when they are harvested in 2008. Minnesota’s pulp and paper manufacturers are experimenting with hybrid poplar as a fiber source to fill a predicted shortfall in the amount of harvestable aspen. The super- imposed graph illustrates the gap in the supply of aspen between 21 and 40 years old, and the abundance in ages 1–10 and 51–plus years old. Source: Minnesota DNR

Throughout the 1880s, annual consumption in the Twin Cities hovered near 300 million board feet—only slightly less than mills in the area were producing. And in 1899, Minneapolis became the leading lumber market in the world. Its mills cut 594.3 million board feet of timber, astonishing for the time. That same year the statewide harvest topped 2.3 billion board feet—2.14 billion of it white pine, more than 200 times the 1997 harvest. The following year, three of the four largest sawmills in the U.S. were reported to be operating in Minnesota, and two of them were in Minneapolis, by then the largest sawmill town on Earth. Its mills alone were worth $52 million.

Until 1848, timber companies owned no private land in Minnesota. Early lumbermen, including those who built the first sawmill at Marine on the St. Croix, simply took what they needed from nearby public domain lands. That year, they bought their first tract —108 acres of pineland—from the federal government for the standard asking price of $1.25 per acre. As the industry fanned out across Minnesota’s white pine forests, it bought more land from the government—sometimes legally and sometimes by questionable means.

As loggers cut their way north, the railroads followed and shantytowns sprang up beside the tracks: Winona, St. Cloud, Little Falls, Brainerd, Stillwater, Cloquet and Virginia. Logging camps first, they became big mill towns. Minnesota was on a roll. Minneapolis sash, door and blind makers did almost $4 million in sales in 1892, factories that built and repaired railroad cars did another $4.2 million and furniture makers did $2.8 million. Lumber paced a wave of economic diversification that pushed Minneapolis ahead of Detroit, Cleveland or New Orleans.

For all of its glory, the Minneapolis sawmill industry was short-lived. By 1907, the biggest mills had lost their competitive advantage to Duluth. One by one, they fell silent. But where Minneapolis lumber had gone south down the Mississippi by barge or west by rail, Duluth lumber moved across Lake Superior, down Lake Michigan to Chicago. But of even greater significance, it moved across Lake Erie to Tonawanda, New York, which then advertised itself as “the greatest white pine assembling and distributing market on the continent.” Perhaps it was, for once Minnesota white pine reached Tonawanda by water it was railed to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Toledo. And from port cities, it reached England, the West Indies and South America.

But the same magnificent rail and barging systems that delivered Minnesota lumber to far-flung destinations also delivered less expensive lumber to Minnesota. In 1888, Northern Pacific Railway tracks reached Tacoma, Washington, the epicenter of a timber treasure many times the size of Minnesota. Five years later, Jim Hill’s Great Northern Railroad also reached the coast. Before the last Minneapolis mill was shut down, coast Douglas fir and western pine constituted 52% of the sales from Minnesota lumberyards.

Many of Minnesota’s timber barons placed big bets in the West—and won again. Chief among them: the reclusive Frederick Weyerhaeuser, whose already vast fortune grew considerably after he bought 900,000 acres of coast Douglas fir timberland from Northern Pacific in 1900—for six cents per thousand board feet.

To her credit, Agnes Larson saw Minnesota’s early timber industry for what it really was—an exploiter, yes, but also the primary turn-of-the-century investor in the state’s future. True, once the pine gave out the industry headed west. But much of the great wealth pine generated stayed in Minnesota where it was invested in a wide variety of enterprises essential to the state’s growth: flour milling, banking, manufacturing, retailing—and philanthropy, including universities, museums and art galleries.

Boise Cascade’s International Falls paper mill stands beside the Rainy River, a prized sturgeon fishery. Over the last decade the company has invested more than $500 million in the Minnesota facility, improving air and water pollution control and increasing manufacturing capacity. More than 1,100 men and women work here, many of them the grandsons and granddaughters of the EW Backus workforce that started here in 1905.

“One thought emerges above all others as this book draws to a close,” she wrote in 1949. “We have seen that the pine forests played a major role in the development of the Upper Mississippi Valley; the lumber industry they supported provided materials, men, capital and institutions which contributed richly to the growth of the nation and particularly the region where the industry flourished. That industry is gone because the pine forests are gone, and Minnesota and the region are poorer as a result. To be sure, we still have much of the material and human wealth that were stored up in the decades of activity in forest and lumber mill.”

With extraordinary vision, she saw the need for Minnesotans to unite around a single theme: restoring the forest industry.

“Our forests should be nurtured so as to serve the generations to come as they did the generations that are past,” she concluded. “To this end the people of Minnesota must shape their plans. Only thoughtful planning and careful management over a long period of time can again make productive the forest lands of the white pine region.”

Ms Larson was right about the need for Minnesotans to get behind a publicly inspired conservation ethic. But what she did not know was that thanks mainly to the unappreciated resiliency of nature, Minnesota’s next forest was already in the ground and growing when C.H. Rogers, superintendent of the Virginia and Rainy Lumber Company, sent the last white pine log down the carriage October 9, 1929. And it is this next forest—the one too young and too scrawny to be regarded as much of a forest in 1949—that is a half-century later poised to power Minnesota’s forest products industry into the new millennium.

And as we enter the new millennium one new thought emerges “above all others” to be added to Ms Larson’s 1949 vision. These new forests do not hold vast reserves of white pine. They are composed mainly of faster growing more easily managed aspen, red pine, jack pine and spruce—species of considerable value to their current owners, whose mills are no longer dependent on white pine. All this should make white pine restoration—however feasible—a little bit easier.