The Lumberman's Frontier: Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America's Forests

by Thomas R. Cox

Overview

With The Lumberman's Frontier, Thomas Cox has reconstructed a groundbreaking history that stands apart from all previous studies of American forests.

Forests were ubiquitous in early America, but it was only in selected areas that trees, rather than farming, ranching, or mining, attracted settlement. These areas constitute the lumberman's frontier, which appeared first in northern New England in the seventeenth century, followed by upstate New York, the Allegheny Plateau, the upper Great Lakes states, the Gulf South, and the Far West.

The forest frontiers generated capital and building materials important in the nation's development, but they also left a legacy of environmental problems, class and urban-rural divisions, and economic frictions. The 1930s marked the end of the lumberman's frontier, but these consequences continue to shape attitudes and policies toward forests, most notably the questions “Whose forests are they? ” and “How and by whom should forests be used?”

Drawing upon recent work in social and economic history, as well as a wealth of historical data on forest industries and individuals, The Lumberman s Frontier neither glorifies economic development nor falls into the maw of ecological gloom-and-doom. It puts individual actors at center stage, allowing the points of view of the workers and lumbermen to emerge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870715792
Publisher:	Oregon State University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2010
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

Table of Contents

Preface x

Chapter 1 Colonists and Trees: Lumbering before the Lumberman's Frontier 1

Chapter 2 The Lumberman's Frontier Emerges 23

Chapter 3 The Maine Frontier at Floodtide 47

Chapter 4 From Farmer-Loggers to Lumbermen in the Mid-Atlantic States 73

Chapter 5 Lumber and Labor in the Pines: New Patterns of Conflict 101

Chapter 6 New Mills, New Markets 125

Chapter 7 The Pull Flowering 149

Chapter 8 Actions and Reactions 191

Chapter 9 Southern Beginnings 213

Chapter 10 Bonanza Years in the Gulf South 235

Chapter 11 To the Farthest Shore—And Beyond 263

Chapter 12 Into the Mountains 291

Chapter 13 The Final Frontier 331

Epilogue Whose Forests Are They? 363

Notes 377

A Note on Sources 513

Index 519

Map 1 Early Maine-New Hampshire forest frontier 10

Map 2 Downeast in Maine 33

Map 3 Middle Atlantic forests 78

MAP 4 Michigan's Lower Peninsula and its lumber markets 127

Map 5 Wisconsin, Minnesota, and downriver 161

Map 6 Gulf Coast pineries 2l8

Map 7 Bonanza South lumber frontier 241

Map 8 Pacific Coast forest frontier 275

Map 9 Interior Far Western pineries 337