WET HOT AMERICAN LUMBER (EASTERN WHITE PINE)
Logging has seen a stark evolution since its origins. What started as a wildly dangerous and often deadly process done largely by hand is now a multibillion dollar industry facilitated by manmade machines. Herein we meet our character, the eastern white pine (Pinus strobus), a ghost from the early days of American logging. In the first of a short series on logging, we hear the tragic tale of this quintessential pine species and the lumber barons who ensured its demise.
Eastern White Pine
(Pinus strobus)
‘Inexhaustible’ was the term du jour newly arriving loggers used in the late 19th Century to describe the endless ocean of eastern white pine that covered the land we today call Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. In the centuries before, further east in what they called New England, ‘endless’ and ‘vast’ would have been common descriptors for the pine forests colonists encountered. What these temporally disparate peoples have in common is how quickly they proved themselves wrong.
One of the principal reasons for the world-wide expansion and colonization that occurred in the so-called Age of Exploration was finding new sources of raw materials that had been—you guessed it—exhausted in Europe. The forests of eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) they found in abundance in the cooler regions and higher mountains of North America was just the thing they were looking for and they wasted no time exploiting it.
Ancient eastern white pines are goliaths by any standards. Able to grow easily over 150 feet (45 m) tall and 6 feet (2 m) in diameter, eastern white pine not only dominated the northern forests of North America by quantity, it lorded over them by stature. They produced long, straight timber that was light, strong, and easily employed for buildings, ships, and bridges. As the colonies became a burgeoning national state, this raw material, seemingly endless in supply, was mined wherever it was found. If one place ran out, all you had to do was look west to find more.
As westward expansion of the new United States took place, the white pine forests west of the Great Lakes drew people by the thousands. The economic powerhouse of capitalism fueled the forging of a new American industry: the timber industry. As was the case with most American industries at the time, regulation was all but unheard of, and a cabal of government and wealthy private interests ensured that if there was money to be made, then nothing would slow it down.
Throughout the late 1800s, the nascent timber industry became a part of the American Story. The timberman was mythologized, the logger was lauded, the clearing of land led to settlement and enfranchisement for the small farmer. All the while, a new class of aristocrat emerged, the Timber Barons, with their pockets lined with saw dust and gold.
With a cultural impetus and an economic motivation, the industry set to work providing the wood for their thriving new country and set their sites on this endless ocean of high-value trees. The sawyers and their crosscut saws seemed as if they would never need to stop. But when they reached the other side of the ocean they thought went on forever, they turned around and found that they had inexplicably found the bottom of a bottomless supply. The great forests of ancient eastern white pine had fallen to the saw almost to a tree.
Today, walking through the sand counties of the Lake States, it’s hard to imagine what the wood cutters of the late 19th Century would have seen on the same walk. Farms and broadleaf trees cover much of the acreage that once was covered with towering pine trees, and what pines have grown back do not yet match the monarchs of old in stature or grandeur.
The logging industry long ago continued west to find the next boundless sea of trees and continued to reap the benefits of unbridled industrial cutting. Only in the 1980s did regulations start to slow their expanse and consider if maybe these trees and forests had other reasons for existence beyond 2 x 4s.
Completely Arbortrary is produced and hosted by Casey Clapp and Alex Crowson
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Cover art by Jillian Barthold
Music by Aves and The Mini-Vandals
Episode cover photo by Ryan Hodnett
Additional Reading:
Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus)
Eastern white pine Info Sheet
White Pine Logging: A Background
The Logging Industry - Minnesota Historical Society
American Canopy by Eric Rutkow