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125 chapter six New Mills, New Markets In the summer of 1840, desperately seeking a new market, Ralph Wadhams dispatched a cargo of lumber from Michigan to a commission merchant in Albany, New York. According to one authority, since “freight and charges . . . ate up all the proceeds” this blind venture was not soon repeated, but the statement is suspect. Other sources maintain that $100,000 worth of lumber went from Michigan to New York the following year, making sawn wood the state’s third-largest export. Be that as it may, Wadham’s shipment heralded the arrival of Michigan lumber on the national scene; until then it had invariably gone to home markets.1 Lumbering was not new to Michigan in 1840—nor was Wadhams new to lumbering—but his shipment, more than anything earlier, heralded the commencement of a new stage in the history of the lumberman’s frontier. There were many parallels between what Wadhams set in motion in Michigan and the industry in Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania, but there would be significant differences too. Much of Michigan’s cut would be marketed in more distant domestic markets than those that had been supplied by the Atlantic Coast states and in interior markets that lumber from those states had rarely reached; the logs utilized by its mills would largely come not from the tracts of proprietors or other private claimants, but directly or indirectly from federal, state, and Indian land. Unlike in Maine, on the Allegheny Plateau, and in much of upstate New York, there were few settlers to draw upon for a work force, its pine belt being thinly settled; most workers would come from outside—often immigrants or experienced workers from earlier centers of lumber production. What developed in Michigan thus had as many parallels to what would follow as the lumberman’s frontier moved on to new areas as it did with those that had preceded it. Wadhams was not the first to cut lumber in Michigan. Rudimentary sawmills had been present during the periods of French and British control, but demand was limited because of Michigan’s tiny, isolated population. The St. Clair area, north of Detroit in the pine belt, was the most active, having seven sawmills by 1800.2 But as Americans moved into Michigan Territory following its opening to settlers in 1818, and especially after completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, local demand increased. Michigan Territory still 126 The Lumberman’s Frontier had only 31,639 inhabitants in 1830, but a speculative land boom followed on the heels of the canal’s completion. Settlement accelerated. By 1837, Michigan’s population approached 175,000 and the then-new state’s census put the number of sawmills at almost four hundred and fifty; the bulk of the settlers and nearly all the mills were located south of the pine belt.3 Wadhams, a Detroit merchant, was among the pioneer millmen and, by all indications, one of the most ambitious. In 1827 he purchased pine land and a mill in St. Clair County, took on a pair of partners from New York, and moved near the millsite to manage his acquisitions. Sales took place both at the mill and in Detroit, to which he shipped lumber by vessels and rafts and where one of Wadhams’ partners, Henry Howard, oversaw the firm’s interests. Plans ran afoul of financial realities. By 1835 the mill was deeply in debt; four years later, unable to extricate themselves from financial difficulties, the partners dissolved the firm. Wadhams’ father, a wealthy New York merchant, intervened to save the investment, and the younger Wadhams continued to operate the sawmill (under arrangements that are not entirely clear); thus, it was apparently Wadhams alone who dispatched that first cargo to New York in 1840.4 Wadhams was not the only Detroit merchant who saw opportunity in the forests of St. Clair County. In 1835, Francis P. Browning spent $35,000 to build a steam sawmill there, the largest mill in the state at the time. When he died a year later, his estate’s assets exceeded debts by a mere $2,667. A group of creditors took over the mill and incorporated it as the Black River Steam Mill Company; their timing was better than Browning’s. Demand picked up in the 1840s and, selling primarily in Detroit, the firm operated successfully until 1855.5 Long before Wadhams’ shipment, the Erie Canal was stimulating growth in the trans-Appalachian country...

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