American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  Together, these factors combined to produce a new dynamic: the industrial company town, an efficient and often ruthless form of production that became commonplace in many extractive industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were hundreds of these towns spread across the South’s pine belt. They sprang up overnight, exhausted the surrounding longleaf pines over the course of ten or twenty years, and then disappeared, their names often lost to history.

  Of course, not all the towns were forgotten. Some were simply too ambitious to fade away entirely. Such was the case with a lumber town that suddenly appeared in 1906 at the eastern edge of Louisiana. Rumors quickly spread that it contained the largest mill ever constructed, a sight that needed to be seen to be believed. Its name would soon be known wherever southern pine trees grew.

  ON AN EARLY September morning in 1905, a small band of men on horseback departed Mandeville, Louisiana, a town thirty miles from New Orleans on the upper bank of Lake Pontchartrain. They headed northeast, into the state’s vast eastern pine forest. This was land that had originally belonged to the Choctaw Indians, before they were relocated to Oklahoma. Now it was simply the backwoods, a region sparsely populated and barely integrated into any trading networks. The group’s ride across this undeveloped land lasted for the better part of the day, through bald cypress swamps and endless stretches of longleaf pines. Eventually the men arrived at a spot near the Pearl River along a creek that the Choctaws had named Bogue Lusa, meaning “dark waters.” Here they dismounted and set up tents for the night.

  The leaders of this scouting party were Charles and Frank Goodyear, two middle-aged brothers. They hailed from Buffalo, New York, and moved in that city’s highest social circles. Charles had begun his career as a lawyer at the same firm where Grover Cleveland, the future president, was a senior partner—Cleveland once described Charles as “one of my best and most intimate friends.” Frank’s social circle included men whose names are now most often seen on buildings, museums, and colleges: Pierpont Morgan, W. K. Vanderbilt, James J. Hill. But unlike these magnates of banking and railroads, the Goodyears had built their fortune in lumbering. They controlled a small empire of fifteen sawmills that spread across New York and northwestern Pennsylvania. Their specialty was hemlock, a species bountiful throughout the region—its tannin-rich bark was coveted by the leather industry and its timber became increasingly valuable as white pine supplies shrank.

  When the commercial hemlock stands themselves began to dwindle toward the turn of the century, the brothers started to look for new investment opportunities. The talk among many northern capitalists at that time was of the southern pine bonanza, and while much of the best lands had already been purchased and some restrictive legislation had been instituted, millions of acres remained. The Goodyears decided that this offered the best possible return on their capital, especially if they could use their extensive contacts to arrange for a new railroad into the region. In January 1902, they chartered a new enterprise, the Great Southern Lumber Company, and soon thereafter hired as their agent James Lacey, the most famous timber surveyor of the time. He subsequently engineered land purchases in eastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi worth $1,250,000.

  The trip to the Bogue Lusa Creek in September 1905 was the final step in the formation of the Great Southern Lumber Company: the selection of a site for the construction of their new mill town. The brothers had initially considered locating their operations in Mississippi, but that state had passed a law limiting real property holdings to $1 million, a pittance compared to the $15 million they intended to invest. This colossal sum dwarfed most of the fly-by-night operations, and the proposed town was correspondingly ambitious. According to a Goodyear family history, when Louisiana locals pressed the scouting party about just what they intended, William Sullivan, the brothers’ longtime head of logging operations, jumped up and declared:

  We’re going to build the biggest sawmill in the world right here. It’ll have a capacity of a million feet of lumber every twenty-four hours. It’ll run day and night for twenty-five maybe thirty years. The logs will be skidded by machinery and then hauled by the trainload to the sawmill. This means we’ll be building a mile of railroad track every day. . . . The town we build will be one of the largest in Louisiana. There’ll be modern homes and schools. There’ll be a hospital and banks. There’ll be jobs for everyone in Washington Parish. Why, this wilderness will be turned into one of the most prosperous parts of Louisiana before you know it.

  Five months after this pronouncement, to the surprise of the skeptical locals, construction on the new town began in earnest. Four-yoke oxen teams delivered supplies from the surrounding settlements, and laborers were brought in to erect a temporary sawmill to handle all the building lumber. The design scheme was one of the most extensive programs of municipal planning ever attempted in America at that point: hundreds of houses, enough for a population expected to reach eight thousand; dozens of public facilities; a twenty-seven-acre log pond excavated from the gravelly soil; a powerhouse with enough generating capacity for the logging operations as well as for the homes of the residents. The Goodyears had also arranged for a new 150-mile train line, running from Jackson, Mississippi, to Slidell, Louisiana, by way of the new town; this was no mere logging railroad, but a new interstate line, the sixth major railway to penetrate the Deep South. Construction activities continued nonstop for more than eighteen months, until November 1, 1907, when the project’s completion was announced. Sullivan’s predictions had come true. The new town was named Bogalusa, but it quickly earned the nickname “The Magic City.”

  The centerpiece of Bogalusa was the new sawmill, a marvel of modern construction. The complex, counting the lumberyard, stretched out over 160 acres. Its operation required about 1,750 men, a number that omitted the countless thousands involved in felling the longleaf pines. Each component had to be specially constructed, since they were pushing the limits of contemporary industrial design. The mill’s main drive belts, for example, each required the leather from 540 hides—Sullivan supposedly once proclaimed, “A belt of this size has never been made before, you say. And you are right.” The General Electric Company, which had provided many of the structure’s components, boasted in a 1908 article, “This is at present the largest electrically operated lumber manufacturing plant in the world, and has an annual production of 175,000,000 feet of lumber.” But these claims were actually too modest. Bogalusa possessed the largest mill of any kind, and its capacity far exceeded 175 million annual board feet. In 1915, it would set a record for cutting 1 million board feet in a single day, an amount that most mills of the period rarely cut in a month. Production would peak in 1916, when Bogalusa churned out almost a quarter billion board feet of lumber—for comparison’s sake, annual production for the entire Weyerhaeuser syndicate in the 1880s was only four times greater.

  Once production got under way, Bogalusa quickly earned a reputation not only as the greatest producer of lumber throughout the Deep South but also as a model company town. It was considered the first in America built along truly modern lines, where every home had electricity. Residents were assured basic public services, including a state-of-the-art hospital that opened in 1909. It also earned distinction for its progressive treatment of black laborers, who composed 60 percent of the workforce. The company provided schools for both whites and blacks, and paid its teachers the best rates in all of Louisiana. Bogalusa even featured YMCAs and YWCAs for each race, something no other Louisiana mill town could claim.

  The lumber industry, by and large, treated labor as expendable, blacks especially so. To serve in a lumber town often meant signing on for a new form of indentured servitude, where payment came in the form of company scrip and living expenses quickly exceeded wages. “Big” Bill Haywood, the charismatic and controversial one-eyed leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union, wrote of the southern logging companies with disgust and anger:

  For miserable shacks
[workers are] compelled to pay exorbitant rents; sewerage there is none; there is no pretense at sanitation; the outhouses are open vaults. . . . Insurance fees are arbitrarily collected from every worker, for which he received practically nothing in return, but whether his time be long or short—one day or a month—with the company, the fee is deducted. The same is true of the doctor fee and the hospital fee, which, in all places, is an imaginary institution.

  Some laborers began to respond to these squalid conditions using the only leverage available: unions. Organizations such as the IWW and the Brotherhood of Timber Workers (the Brotherhood) began to appear at company towns starting in the early twentieth century—in most instances, whites and blacks were both invited to join, though they were arranged in separate locals. Logging companies, including the Great Southern, responded unequivocally, refusing employment to union members and often threatening the organizers. In 1906, the owners banded together to form the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association (the Association) specifically to combat the union menace. In his article “Timber Workers and Timber Wolves,” Haywood predicted, “The fight will be a long one and a bitter one. The struggle will be intense. Members and their families will suffer keen heart pangs, as the lumber barons will not loosen the stranglehold on their ill-gotten profits until they have exhausted every weapon that Capitalism has armed them with.”

  Tensions first boiled over in August 1911. In an attempt to eradicate the Brotherhood, the Association decided to lock out union members at more than forty lumber mills across western Louisiana and eastern Texas. As part of the campaign, the Association also tried to divide the Brotherhood against itself, ridiculing the union for its acceptance of blacks, but this strategy failed to split the movement. Both sides soon armed themselves and prepared for a violent clash that seemed increasingly unavoidable. In July 1912, at Grabow, Louisiana, the inevitable finally arrived: Men from each side fought a ten-minute gun battle that left four dead, three from the union and one from the companies. The gunfight resolved little, but the trial of fifty-eight union men that followed drained the Brotherhood’s resources. The Association, consequently, largely triumphed in what historians have labeled “the Louisiana-Texas Lumber War of 1911–1913.” As for Bogalusa, its position in the far east of Louisiana had insulated it from most of the activity, but it was only a matter of time before similar problems would reach the Magic City.

  In the wake of World War I, several factors converged to renew the momentum of the union movement across the southern pine forests. The requirements of total war had forced the federal government to intervene broadly in the nation’s labor affairs to prevent shortages, bringing new energy and resources to the union movement. Additionally, the Woodrow Wilson administration showed deference to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the country’s largest and most influential union. National union enrollment jumped almost 50 percent between 1916 and 1919, from 2.8 million to 4 million. Furthermore, southern lumberers gained increased leverage both because new regional industries provided wage competition and because large numbers of blacks moved north, a demographic shift known as the Great Migration, which decreased the available labor pool.

  In early 1919, the AFL began a campaign to organize southern loggers inside the region that encompassed Bogalusa. The Great Southern Lumber Company flatly refused to allow any union activity, especially among blacks. Lum Williams, a thirty-year-old placed in charge of the union campaign at Bogalusa, wrote to Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL, that “[t]he success of the entire labor movement of the South depends on this fight,” since the town contained the largest mill and owners looked to it as a regional leader.

  As the summer arrived, the company initiated “a reign of terror,” in the words of the AFL national secretary. Union men were viciously beaten and expelled from the town. Like the Association in 1911, the Great Southern tried to exploit race-based antagonisms. One Bogalusa lumberman recalled that the plan “was to turn the Black men against the whites and then smash the white union.” Tensions between the races were already high—in late August a mob lynched a black veteran for allegedly trying to rape a white woman—but the lumber workers stood together in spite of this. They even marched side by side in a Labor Day parade.

  In late November, the situation deteriorated further. Problems began when a company-directed mob attempted to kill the leader of the town’s black unionists, Sol Dacus. He escaped into the nearby swamps, and, while hiding among the bald cypress trees, encountered two white unionists out for a hunt. They offered to escort him to Lum Williams’s house, where an official report could be filed. The three men marched through the streets of Bogalusa, two white men protecting a black man, an unprecedented sight. Shortly after they reached Williams’s garage, a posse seventy-five strong arrived. Accounts differed about precisely what happened, but when the guns stopped firing, three union men were dead, including Williams and one of Dacus’s white escorts (his second escort died the following week).

  The Bogalusa shoot-out was perhaps the only time that southern whites took up arms and laid down their lives to defend blacks in the first half of the twentieth century. Nothing equivalent would be seen until the civil rights era. Nevertheless, the legendary gunfight also killed union resistance in Bogalusa. The entire southern logging industry followed Bogalusa’s lead in this matter, just as Williams had earlier predicted.

  With the labor issue handled decisively, the Great Southern turned its attention to a new challenge, but one long familiar to the lumber industry. The trees that once seemed inexhaustible were disappearing, the cathedral-like longleaf pine forests replaced with stump-filled fields. The company’s big mill consumed forty to sixty acres of virgin pine every day, roughly twenty thousand acres per year. Bogalusa’s management first reacted to this impending crisis in 1917 by opening a pulp and paper mill, which took advantage of new techniques that allowed for the conversion of non-timber-quality southern pines into coarse grades of paper known as kraft. But the company also displayed a more enlightened view of forestry policy than any of its peers, and began to replant its cut-over lands in 1920. Soon it was running ads saying, “you can practically insure the complete satisfaction of your trade during the life of your business . . .” because Bogalusa timber was “assured to you IN PERPETUITY by our far-reaching reforestation operations.” Their man-made forest would expand by the early 1960s to more than two hundred thousand acres, the largest privately owned hand-planted forest on earth.

  The industry as a whole, however, showed little interest in such reforestation efforts. As one southern logger with fifty years’ experience explained, “real forest management didn’t come along [in the region] until the late thirties.” But by then it was too late to preserve most of the forests. The process set in motion with the 1870s land grab reached its inexorable conclusion after northern capitalists stripped the South’s forests bare. They left behind millions of acres of cut-over land whose nitrogen-poor soil was worth peanuts, literally, as that was one of the few nitrogen-fixing crops that thrived under such conditions. Bogalusa was among the few mill towns that survived, a lonely reminder of an industry that once reshaped the South and provided much of the nation’s building materials.

  In the 1930s, the southern pine region would witness a broad resurgence as a producer of kraft paper, the product that the Great Southern had anticipated. This new industry would depend mainly on fifteen- to twenty-year-old second-growth trees, mostly from lands the earlier lumber business had denuded. While these young trees made excellent pulp, they were far too small for timber. But by then the logging industry had found a new source of suitable trees, thousands of miles away, in the far corner of the nation.

  “A Shrewd Deal”

  THE LAND AGENT for the Northern Pacific Railway Company laid the final contract on the table the morning of January 3, 1900. Across from him sat Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the lord of the lumber barons, now sixty-five years old, his beard gone white but his intensity undiminished. The man who had bu
ilt the Lake States logging industry looked over the terms placed before him carefully, studiously, knowing the scope of the purchase and the amount of capital and the number of men involved. Finally, each man at the table grabbed a pen and made the terms official, a transfer of nine hundred thousand acres of Pacific Northwest timberland at six dollars an acre. It was one of the largest private land transfers in American history and—as the years stacked up and more facts surfaced—one of the most controversial.

  The property Weyerhaeuser had just acquired sat in the heart of the nation’s last and perhaps greatest forest, one that exceeded even the longleaf pine belt of the South. It ranged across Oregon, Washington, and much of Northern California, a region known collectively as the Pacific Northwest. Here, in the far corner of the nation, was a storehouse of timber not only practically untouched but also richer than anything previously encountered. Stewart Holbrook, the preeminent chronicler of the region’s lumber industry, observed: “[O]ne acre of [this forest] contains more timber than did five acres of the biggest, thickest stuff Maine or Michigan could offer.” The tree resources were so abundant, so capacious, that although they covered a mere one-eighth of the nation’s total forest acreage, they contained between one-half and two-thirds of America’s commercial standing timber resources in the early twentieth century.

  The region possessed a great diversity of tree species, but the most commercially important one was unquestionably the Douglas fir. It was a massive conifer, like the giant sequoias or coastal redwoods of California. Many grew to 250 feet or higher, their dark-gray, arrow-straight trunks often 8 to 10 feet thick. Sargent observed in 1898: “No other American tree of the first magnitude is so widely distributed or can now afford so much timber, and the rapidity of its growth and its power of reproduction under favorable circumstances make it the most valuable inhabitant of the great coniferous forest of the northwest, which it ennobles with its majestic port and splendid vigor.” The species, which ranged widely across the western United States, reached its maximum capacity and densest growth within a fifty-five-thousand-square-mile territory that ran north-south from Puget Sound (at the border between the United States and Canada) to Northern California, starting on the Pacific coast and stretching into the western slopes of the Cascade Range.