![]() ![]() In the Rogue River Valley, Medford-based Owen-Oregon Company built logging railroads to places such as Butte Falls, where a huge volume of pine lumber was turned out during the 1920s. With their miles of logging railroads, the companies set off nearly seventy years of pine manufacturing in what is now Bend’s upscale Old Mill District. Hill’s Great Northern Railway constructed a line up the Deschutes River Gorge to the small town of Bend in 1911.īend quickly became a pacesetter for ponderosa pine production when two Great Lakes firms, Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon, opened modern sawmills on opposite sides of the Deschutes River in 1916. The Southern Pacific extended a railroad to Klamath Falls in 1909, and J ames J. The Northern Pacific reached Portland in 1883, and the Oregon Short Line connected Union Pacific’s road at Granger, Wyoming, with the Columbia River at Wallula Junction in 1884, opening the Blue Mountains to timber harvesting. The completion of transcontinental railroads to the Northwest in the 1880s extended logging and lumbering to less accessible areas, especially eastern Oregon. Although Williamson also was found guilty, his conviction was overturned on appeal. He died before a court could hear his appeal. A jury found Mitchell guilty of assisting a friend to fraudulently acquire timberland. Senator John Mitchell and Congressman John Williamson. The most sensational trials involved Oregon’s U.S. Heney as special prosecutor for what became known as the Oregon Land Fraud cases. Those activities attracted the attention of Secretary of the Interior Ethan Hitchcock, who appointed San Francisco attorney Francis J. The scheme involved company agents, who staked homestead claims for 160 acres of timber and then commuted titles to investors. Smith’s agents used dummy entrymen under the Homestead Act to fraudulently block up large forested acres into single units. They played fast and loose with state and federal land laws to transfer thousands of acres of public land to private ownership. The Great Lakes lumbermen and other investors who speculated in timberland at the turn of the twentieth century operated through railroad real estate agents and federal and state land offices to amass huge holdings. On the Columbia River, Portland businessman Simon Benson pioneered a new technique in the early decades of the twentieth century, using ocean-going tugboats to pull large cigar-shaped log rafts to his sawmill in San Diego. By the dawn of the twentieth century, several large mills lined Portland’s waterfront, producing sawn lumber for California and Asian markets. Smith took advantage of his properties on the southern Oregon Coast to open a state-of-the-art sawmill on Coos Bay in 1908, and his ships made regular trips to the company’s finishing mill at Bay Point northeast of San Francisco. With timberlands in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin rapidly diminishing during the late nineteenth century, Great Lakes timber locators prowled Northwest forests on behalf of lumbermen such as Charles Axel Smith and Frederic Weyerhaeuser, laying claim to huge timberlands for their moneyed patrons. Using cargo ships to haul lumber from his coastal mills to retail outlets in San Francisco, Simpson turned his enterprises into extractive tributaries for California markets. Asa Mead Simpson followed with a steam-powered mill that dominated production on Coos Bay for decades. George Wasson, who used oxen to haul logs to his water-powered sawmill in 1853, initiated the Coos lumber trade. During and after Oregon’s territorial period, Coos Bay, on the southern coast, was the exemplar of a timber-dependent community. The Northwest has been a significant regional, national, and international participant in the lumber trade since the Hudson’s Bay Company built a water-powered sawmill at Fort Vancouver in 1827. With the region’s increasingly diversified economy in the twenty-first century, however, wood products are no longer among the region's top commodities. Washington State became the nation’s leading producer of wood products in 1910, a position that Oregon has held since 1938. ![]() With the development of rail lines in the 1870s and 1880s, the forested valleys of the western Cascades and the ponderosa pine stands of eastern Oregon became centers of lumber production. Forests on the Oregon Coast and the lower Columbia River had attracted those in the mid-nineteenth century who wanted to capitalize on gold-rush California’s growing demand for lumber. Since the 1880s, long before the mythical Paul Bunyan roamed the Northwest, the timber industry has been a driving force in the economies of Oregon and Washington and British Columbia.
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