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101 chapter five Lumber and Labor in the Pines: New Patterns of Conflict If Glens Falls provided the first clear manifestations in the Mid-Atlantic States of a genuine lumberman’s frontier, developments at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, represented its fullest flowering. Nothing earlier, not Glens Falls, not even Bangor in its heyday, had been a larger, more vibrant, more productive lumber center. Located on the West Branch of the Susquehanna, Williamsport became preeminent for a variety of reasons. The West Branch drained a vast area of pine forest. The river was well suited for log drives and booming. The city had access to both the Pennsylvania canal system and railroads by which its mills could market their cut in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other Atlantic seaboard centers.1 The statistical record attests to Williamsport’s importance. Its first big mill appeared in 1838, shortly after the Pennsylvania Canal gave it access to outside lumber markets, yet growth remained slow. In 1850 the population was a mere 1,615, then with construction of a large boom just upriver it quickly accelerated. By 1860 the population was 5,664, and by 1866 there were thirty sawmills in the city with a combined capacity of 995 thousand board feet per twelve-hour day (over three hundred million board feet per year).2 Production was consistently less than capacity, but output was tremendous nonetheless. The great St. Patrick’s Day flood of 1865 carried away three spans of the river bridge and some fifty million feet of lumber stacked in millyards; at its height nine-tenths of the city was under water, but the boom that was key to operations held, and production and growth quickly resumed. By 1872 there were forty sawmills employing some three thousand men. In 1876, sixty-eight million board feet left the city via the Pennsylvania Railroad, sixty-three million on the Catawissa Railroad, and forty-seven million by canal. Considerable production at Lock Haven, a few miles up the West Branch from Williamsport (and with a boom of its own), swelled the area’s output further. Clinton County (of which Lock Haven was the seat) had ninety-three sawmills.3 Records areinadequate to quantify theforward andbackward integration of the firms that produced this huge output. The absence of comment suggests there was almost no forward integration; wholesale and retail yards near the markets and the means of reaching them seem to have 102 The Lumberman’s Frontier been left to others. But those with sufficient capital engaged in backward integration from an early date. John DuBois was among them, buying his first sawmill in Lycoming County and timberland to supply it in 1838. However, limited investment capital apparently necessitated that many of the area’s early lumbermen concentrated on milling and left logging and ownershipoftimberstandstoothers.Graduallythischanged;owningtimber seemed essential if one’s mill were to be assured of sawlogs and avoid the uncertainties of purchasing logs on the open market. Local participation in building the Williamsport boom was another early step in backward integration; building railroads to tap company stands followed. Actual (or virtual) company towns, places such as DuBois and Cross Fork, emerged upstream with company stores and other adjuncts of backward integration usually present. Reinvestment of profits, coupled with an influx of capital from Maine, made such developments possible.4 Williamsport was more than just another great lumber-producing center. Events there, and in the hinterlands tributary to it, heralded changes in lumbering more clearly than anything that occurred elsewhere. The Clearfield County War of 1855 announced that the dominance by farmerloggers who cut timber in winter and rafted it to market on spring floods was coming to an end. And the Williamsport lumber strike of 1872 made manifest the fact that while lumbering was still fraught with frictions, as it had been since colonial times, it had become part of America’s new industrial order and was now divided not so much between those inside and those outside the industry as between capital and labor. Behind both developments lay the great Susquehanna Boom, trigger to Williamsport’s explosive growth. The first steps toward building the boom came in 1836, when John Leighton arrived from Maine to investigate the West Branch’s potential for lumbering. He recognized that the miles-long stretch of deep, quiet water just above Williamsport provided an ideal location for a massive boom. Such a structure could collect logs from the vast area of the Allegheny Plateau drained by the upper West...

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