The Lumberman’s Frontier: Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America’s Forests (review)

The English colonists depended on North American forests to survive, yet they attached no real value to the timber they harvested. Thus began three centuries of irony regarding Americans’ land use and the development of the timber industry. Author Thomas R. Cox begins his examination of the rise of the lumberman—a persona who utilized forestland and timber as his sole income source—in the northeastern region of colonial America, and then methodically describes the migration of experienced lumbermen into untapped forests that preceded or, at times, paralleled the westward expansion of the United States. The author, however, probes beyond the physical movement of Americans and describes how the lumberman’s frontier and the subsequent corporatism of the timber industry reinforced social orders, race relations, and the tensions between labor and management.

Cox argues that the three-centuries old rivalries between loggers and lumbermen, mill workers and businessmen, and local operators and speculators were grounded more in participants’ socioeconomic backgrounds and perspectives than any other factor. He observes that the technological developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—steam-powered sawmills, circular saws, canals, crosscut saws, and railroads—combined with colonial and, later, state laws that rewarded mill construction and land speculation, fueled efficient harvests and allowed corporate raiders to move through America’s forests like locusts, felling millions of logs, destroying local operators, and exploiting local workers. The subsequent environmental degradation and economic instability—boomtowns soon became ghost towns—only heightened the resentment of mill workers and townsfolk toward their corporate masters.

Although late to the national timber story, the South did not escape the maneuverings of the lumbermen, which arrived in the Deep South and Texas following Reconstruction. Northern woods became scarce and more expensive, and many white southerners turned from hardscrabble farming to mill-working wage laborers. Cox also illustrates how the influx of lumbermen reinforced the southern economic order; whites prevented carpetbagger mill owners from hiring blacks who worked for lower wages and became a threat to whites who needed the mill and logging jobs. In the end, though, the timber and petroleum industries created the perfect storm that fueled industrialization and economic growth in Texas and the South.

To say that The Lumberman’s Frontier is a well-researched, thorough work understates Thomas Cox’s achievement. The citations and source notes take up nearly one-third of the printed pages, and the information in the citations alone takes the reader on mini-adventures. Cox is to be commended for acquiring and weaving together hundreds of primary and secondary sources into a massive yet meaningful national history, but the reader’s memorable journey is a bit tedious at times. Describing how the lumberman’s frontier reached each region of the country—and Cox seems to have been everywhere the timber industry developed in the U.S.—highlighting the resources and sequence of events within each area, the reader will periodically feel a sense of déjà vu with only the names of businessmen and public officials having changed from one region to the next. This criticism, notwithstanding, Cox suggests that Americans may never decide who should control the nation’s forests or how forestland should be used. Indeed, although government management of the forests has alleviated locals’ fear of corporate misbehavior, these rural residents and forest dwellers insist they have the right to act as they please (e.g., hunt, fish, harvest logs) and they now must battle a new external force: those who value forests for their aesthetic beauty, not their economic potential.