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The Logging Industry Comes to Washington

© Jerri Brooker

Trees, logs and forests are in my blood. So is my thirst for knowledge about the logging industry. So I read and I write about logging.

Here's a little history of how logging came to Washington State when, in the early 1900's, a large migration of loggers came to Washington State from the Great Lakes region to start the beginning of a culture that is now synonymous with the Northwest.

HOW IT CAME TO BE

A little background: Vancouver, Washington housed the water-driven mill of the Hudson's Bay Company. It started operations in 1820, but commercial logging and sawmilling didn't take hold until 1841. Henry Yesler built a sawmill in 1853 that was a precursor to modern day Seattle. By 1900 the logging industry was going full-force in our neck of the woods.

BACK EAST START

The United States' logging industry got its roots in the New England States. When the woods became depleted there loggers wandered on over to the Great Lakes region. In 1836 when Charles Merrill of Lincoln, Maine purchased timber on the St. Clair River in Michigan, the industry boomed. A dollar and a quarter an acre was the going price around then. The logging land grab and migration there continued well into the Civil War period.

HOLY OLD MACKINAW

According to Stewart Holbrook, author of Holy Old Mackinaw, at the turn of the century "...the federal government reported that the remote State of Washington had crashed overnight into lumber supremacy with a production of four billion feet, or almost as much as Wisconsin and Minnesota put together". Stories began to take hold in logging camps where a logger heard of "...something called Douglas Fir that grew to be twelve feet through at the butt and ran more than three hundred and more feet straight up into the clouds...". Holbrook continues: "When the first loggers saw the fir that grew along the banks of the Columbia and around Puget Sound they said there couldn't be timber that big and tall. It took, so they told each other, two men and a boy to look to the top of one of those giants."

So these loggers packed up their gear and moved west to check it out. They were a tough, adventuresome crew. Some of the bosses flaunted their lucrative earnings.

In the logging boom Pope and Talbot built a mill at Port Ludlow, Washington. Constructed around the time of Yesler's mill, it was a booming place. Holbrook tells of Cyrus Walker, head of the Pope and Talbot mill, who built "...a New England mansion which had no peer in Washington, Territory and State." It overlooked the mill and harbor, with a War of 1812 relic bronze canon from Boston in the front yard. White picket fence surrounded the property. The Walker mansion was the place to be for visiting lumber and railroad management. Holbrook says, "The cellar was suave, stocked with everything from Medford rum for old sea captains to marque champagne for the delicate but often thirsty ladies of lumber buyers."

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