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4 From Farmer-Loggers to Lumbermenin the Mid-Atlantic States
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73 chapter four From Farmer-Loggers to Lumbermen in the Mid-Atlantic States As important lumbering was in Maine during the early nineteenth century, however much it dominated its public image, Maine was not alone as a lumbering state. By 1825 New York reportedly had 4,321 sawmills, nearly six times as many as Maine (although few resembled Maine’s large commercial mills sawing for distant markets). By 1840 both New York and Pennsylvania led the Pine Tree State in the number of sawmills, with New York’s production more than double that of Maine. The differential continued to grow. Census records for 1850 report New York led all states with 4,625 mills and an output valued over $13 million; Pennsylvania was second with 2,894 mills and a production value of $7.7 million. Maine had only 732 mills, and although they were on average considerably larger, their combined production of $5.8 million was well behind either of the two large Middle Atlantic States. The figures are not entirely reliable—many sawmills went unreported—but the data are adequate to show that by mid-century lumber production was well established in Pennsylvania and New York and present, though less dramatically, in New Jersey.1 The Mid-Atlantic’s impressive output was not the result of the emergence thereof a lumberman’s frontier—that would come later—but largely because of the size and health of its agricultural sector. Still, consumption was not entirely agrarian. The steady if unspectacular growth of early New York generated a continual demand for building materials, both on the farm and off. By 1750 New York was the third-largest colonial port and demand from merchants complemented that of farmers. The staple exports were wheat and flour, lumber and other wood products, and furs. Overcutting of readily accessible stands—both by New Yorkers and by stave- and shingle-getters from New Jersey who, having depleted the white cedar stands of their own colony, had turned to cutting in New York—soon led to a lessening of quality of New York’s lumber; by 1765 the colony’s merchants were seeking regulations “to restore the credit of our lumber” in the marketplace. Depletion also led to rising prices for fuelwood, leading many people by the end of New York’s colonial period to shift to coal for heating. Yet it was a long time before something that could legitimately be called a lumberman’s frontier emerged in New York. As in early Maine, it was 74 The Lumberman’s Frontier primarily a quest for farmland that drew settlers to new areas; lumbering was an adjunct, serving to meet farmers’ needs and to provide them with supplementary income. But unlike in Maine, agriculture in New York was sufficiently promising that there was less incentive for agrarians to abandon, or even de-emphasize, farming in favor of lumbering. When a lumbering frontier finally would emerge in New York it might have been expected to draw upon men, money, and technology from Maine, thus initiating a pattern of transfer that would be seen in many a subsequent area, but that does not seem to have been the case. New York’s lumber industry seems to have been overwhelmingly homegrown.2 Initially, events followed a similar pattern in Pennsylvania. Agricultural demand was the main driving force from the beginning, but commercial considerations—the need for exports to make the colony pay—were present too. Johan Printz, governor of Sweden’s early colony on the Delaware, received instructions “to examine and consider how and in what manner profit may be derived” from New Sweden’s “abundant forests,” hardly a surprising directive considering Sweden’s own experience with profitable forest operations, including exports to Britain. By the time William Penn arrived in Pennsylvania, there were four Swedish sawmills on the river and shingle and stave making were well established. Production mounted thereafter. By 1760 there were forty sawmills in Philadelphia County alone. They were small, but their cumulative impact was significant. In 1705 one millowner had described his plant: “It occupies a building 32 by 70 feet. . . . We can cut with one saw seven or eight hundred feet of inch boards a day and more sometimes when the water is high.” Such a mill might gross£400 per year, and the forty present in 1760 obviously much more.3 With a reputation as “the best poor man’s country” and policies that encouraged immigration, settlers poured into “Penn’s Woods...