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47 chapter three The Maine Frontier at Floodtide Maine became a state in 1820; the first lumberman’s frontier came into full flower there not long after. The two developments were intimately connected. Lumbering had developed slowly during the colonial and early national periods. Knowledge of the value of the District of Maine’s forests, the technology and expertise for exploiting them, and entrepreneurs, workers and others dedicated to doing so had all appeared over the preceding years. By providing employment and exports, Maine’s forests contributed to a gradual buildup of the district’s economy, infrastructure, and population and brought closer the day when statehood would become well nigh inevitable. After 1820, with statehood providing a freer hand to those desiring to further economic growth by tapping the state’s most plentiful resource, the last prerequisite for full development of the forests was in place. But 1820 marked more than the commencement of statehood. In a more general way, it was the beginning of a new era in the exploitation of Maine’s forests. Until then lumbering had been essentially pre‑industrial, carried on by individuals who made limited investments in land or equipment, performed a multiplicity of poorly differentiated functions, and engaged in minimal processing. Loggers’ activities were those of resource gatherers, while those of lumber manufacturers were more artisanal than industrial— and the separation between the two, loggers and lumbermen, was often from season to season rather than individual to individual. This had begun to change earlier, but the speed with which modifications came accelerated rapidly after 1820. The older patterns persisted in remote, newly opened areas in the interior, but in more accessible and established locations the size of investments, levels of functional differentiation and processing, and—not least—the mindset of those engaged all changed. Lumbering became at least proto‑industrial, and the lumberman’s frontier of Maine thus a special sort of manufacturer’s frontier. This transition took place not just at the logging and milling levels; transportation and marketing grew more intricate and took on new forms. Of course, there had been a slow but steady growth of sophistication in tapping Maine’s forests ever since the days of Humphrey Chadbourne and that first mill near Berwick, but now a qualitative as well as quantitative shift was taking 48 The Lumberman’s Frontier place. Developments at Machias had been a harbinger, but in many ways that community’s activity was the result of individual more than collective efforts (remember, each of the pioneer participants owned his own saw blade and used it to cut his own logs at the mill). Now, associations and other forms of business combination far more sophisticated than those at Machias increasingly supplanted individual enterprise. Corporations appeared in ever‑larger numbers and, with the advantages they possessed, made bigger‑than‑ever pools of investment capital available. Larger and more complex partnerships worked in the same direction. Various forms of inter‑firm cooperation also emerged, bringing increased complexity to the industry as well as to individual operations. An insatiable demand for lumber drove the development, leading producers to construct ever‑larger plants and to adopt new technologies as they became available: Maine’s first steam‑powered sawmill went on line in Bath in 1821, and practical circular saws, developed at Brunswick the year before, were used increasingly thereafter, especially in the 1850s. Statehood thus marked the approximate beginning of an era in which not only were the producing units larger and more complex, but also group activities came to the fore, making the term “lumber industry” mean something more than the sum of the efforts of individual operators.1 Increased complexity did not come in steady increments. From 1820 to 1836 widespread recognition of the potential for lumbering in Maine spurred a wave of speculation in timberlands. Lands sold and sold again in an accelerating round of price increases. In June 1835 Niles Register reported that from daylight to sunset the land office in Bangor was crowded with speculators, many from Boston and New York, and some tracts had increased ten‑fold in price since the winter of 1834. Indeed, timberland that a decade before had sold for 6 cents an acre now went for as much as $10.2 Some observers saw the speculative fever as assuring a great future for the lumber industry. The Bangor Daily Whig noted in 1834: “The vast speculations . . . have served to unfold, in some degree, the real value of our long neglected forests...

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