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1 chapter one Colonists and Trees: Lumbering before the Lumberman’s Frontier Many things lured European settlers to North America, but the continent’s forest wealth was not prominent among them. Accounts of explorers and early visitors made clear the new land was cloaked with trees. Many an observer discussed the potential value of these for medicinal purposes, staves, and shipbuilding. Policymakers considered the potential of forests as a source of naval stores and masts. Still, most settlers were not drawn by such considerations, but by the availability of agricultural land and opportunities for trade and freedom of worship. Indeed,forestslongseemedanobstaclemorethanasourceofopportunity. As the abode of Indians and dangerous animals, as places outside the sphere of Christian civilization, and as landscapes so different from long‑settled western Europe that they seemed dark and dreary rather than uplifting, the forests of the new land were used, but little treasured and never loved. In 1747 Jared Eliot lamented how the first settlers, “tho’t themselves obliged to stubb all Staddle [i.e., saplings] and cut down or lop all great Trees; in which they expended much Cost and Time, to the prejudice of the Crop and impoverishing the Land.” As they “began the world a New,” as he put it, they sought to recreate on the western side of the Atlantic what they had known on the eastern, a land of permanent settlements, fixed fields bounded by fences, and open meadows with but a few scattered trees.1 Forests hindered the process of building an agricultural society. In 1681 Thomas Markham wrote of Pennsylvania: “It is a very fine Country, if it were not so overgrown with Woods.” A visitor to Britain’s mid‑Atlantic colonies explained, “[A]t the beginning in the nearer, and latterly in the farther reaches of America, wood has been everywhere in the way of the new planter [and] . . . people have grown accustomed to regard forests . . . as the most troublesome of growths.”2 Although settlers neither loved nor valued the forests of British North America and were not drawn to the continent to exploit them, they made extensive use of them nonetheless. From the first, the ubiquitous forests provided building materials, fuel, and material for a host of everyday uses. Wood was much more widely used in the New World than in the old, leading one British visitor to warn his countrymen that in America they 2 The Lumberman’s Frontier would have to accept “a Wooden Town in a Wooden Country & a wooden bred set of Tavern‑keepers.”3 Colonists everywhere drew upon the woods. The first English arrivals exported oak staves from Virginia in 1607, and their counterparts to the north did the same from Plymouth in 1621, William Bradford reporting the Fortune “was speedily dispacht away, being laden with good clapbord as full as she could stowe.” Following the usage of the time, Bradford surely meant oak barrel staves, not wainscoting—the clapboards of a later generation.4 Colonists generated these first exports by riving logs with wedges and mauls, but sawmills soon sprang up from the Carolinas to Maine. The Virginia Company was “very solicitous for the erection of saw‑mills,” sending Poles and Dutchmen to build them. The first mills had indifferent success, but after mid‑century “saw‑mills became as numerous as grist‑mills” in Virginia. Three mills operated in New Netherland in 1623, and the number was increasing rapidly. By the time the English took over in 1664, there were some forty sawmills in the colony, more even than in New Hampshire. Sawmills also appeared at an early date in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, especially in the Cape Fear region from whence sawn pine became a staple export.5 To the north, employees of John Mason erected a mill on Salmon Falls River in 1634, thus laying the groundwork for a huge export trade from the Piscataqua and its tributaries that soon became the economic backbone of New Hampshire and southern Maine. In Maine, sparsely settled though it was, there were twenty‑four sawmills by 1682.6 Regional differences in forest utilization quickly developed, reflecting local conditions. In the South, where the fall line was far from the coast, the number of sawmills grew slowly, but production of staves (for tobacco barrels), naval stores (from the highly resinous pines of the area), and charcoal (to fuel Virginia’s iron smelters) burgeoned. Local specialties added to the output. In Georgia, William Knox’s plantations were kept going until his agricultural enterprises...

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