One of my favorite past times is watching a movie and reading book titles and their synopses. To each his own. I love weaving stories with them and imagining what is inside the covers.
Once up a lumber town, a book by Roselynn Ederer, tells the story of Saginaw, a Michigan lumber town. Apparently its book three of a three book series. A Company Town: Potlatch, Idaho and the Potlatch Lumber Company, showed how the frontier was settled and big business exploited the natural resources of the frontier. There, people like Edward Rada could be found Singing My Song: Growing Up in a Lumber Town: Mill City, Oregon 1916-1939.
At this time, the Lumber Kings and Shantymen: Logging and Lumbering in the Ottawa Valley, by David Lee, the lumber industry was going through another change. Towns like Ottawa were becoming "government towns" instead of lumber towns by the 1920s. Books like David Lee's make sure to show a social history combined with an economic history, well he says cultural, to tell the story of a Canadian legacy.
For an American perspective, maybe head over to the Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest by Linda Carlson. Here we see the controlled daily life of town residents, even down to the prostitutes. In these books, we learn that The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills: Shaped America. Many of these towns became Nameless towns: Texas sawmill communities, 1880-1942.
The sawmills and company towns all tell the same moral environmentally, that the Sawmill: The story of Cutting the Last Great Virgin Forest East of the Rockies. These towns were dominated by lumber barons like T.W. Rosborough, employed many men and controlled their lives. What made these lumber and sawmill towns was life in the Deep Woods Frontier: A History of Logging in Northern Michigan.There the trees would felled, and the logs would be put on A Raft Pilot's Log: A History of the Great Rafting Industry on the Upper Mississippi. Rafting Days in Pennsylvania was one of many Commerce on Early American Waterways: The Transport of Goods by Arks, Rafts, and Log Drives.
Log driving and "forestry industries" began in the colonial period in America. As settlers set roots along waterways, naturally these waterways became the trucker highways. You find out in the Commerce book how "Woodhicks" became the "feared fighting force in the Union Army, known as Bucktails." Without these books one might think that the lumber era was An Almost Forgotten Era: Some Recollections of the Log Rafting and Towing Operations on the St. John River. Luckily these books are here to yell Timber.....: A History of Logging in New England.
With so much focus on the rivers and forests like Logging the Redwoods, we lose track of the role of steamboats and Minnesota Logging Railroads. The book details the first roaring locomotive in Minnesota for logging in 1886 and how when the mills closed in 1937, the rail went with it. The rails supported The White Pine Industry in Minnesota: A History.
So I lied, the real moral of these stories was that lumbering was Green Gold: The Story of the Hassinger Lumber Company of Konnarock, Virginia. The books all tell the story of the relationship between Americans and Their Forests: A History. I leave you with one reminder, when remember the big people like the Lumberjacks and Legislators: Political Economy of the U.S. Lumber Industry, 1890-1941, don't forget about the little people, From Lumber Hooker to Hooligan Fleet: A Treasury of Chicago Maritime History. If you do forget, the history will go up in Sawdust Memories: A History of Camden, Texas, and we will forget how the American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and Making of a Nation.
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