Canadian Lumber Industry in 1906

James Elliott Defebaugh's History of the Lumber Industry of America

I haven’t been able to find out much about the author, James Elliott Defebaugh. But I did notice that he was the publisher of The Timberman, one of the two trade publications that merged into the American Lumberman. And that he helped organize a lumber industry convention in December 1896. Luckily, he mentions this in the text, because history has pretty much forgotten the man.

In introducing his topic, Defebaugh equates the history of the lumber industry with “the history of progress, of settlement, and of civilization” (3). It might be interesting to look through this sometime when I’m looking for a turn of the century perspective on US History, because the author spends quite a bit of time on early America and even on the Civil War. But that’s not my goal here. 

The first part of this first of two volumes covers the commercial forests of Canada. The white pine (Pinus strobus) and Norway or red pine (P. resinosa) are the most valuable trees. They grow between the US border and the “Height of Land”, which Defebaugh describes as “the dividing ridge or boundary line between the waters which flow into Hudsoin Bay or into the Atlantic north of the Strait of Belle Isle, and those which by the Great Lakes find their way through the St. Lawrence to the ocean” (57). This is a really interesting idea for a US historian: a dividing line that runs more or less east to west rather than north to south, like our Continental Divide. There’s probably a lot to unpack here, but I’ll put that aside for another day, too. The point for now is that the valuable stands of white and red pine are south of that dividing line, in a swath that includes the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa River watersheds. 

The best forests, Defebaugh says, lie within “a rough triangle bounded by the Ottawa River on the northeast, Georgian Bay and Lake Huron on the west and Lake Erie and Lake Ontario on the south” (58). These trees are nearly always within easy reach of the river systems, so Canadian lumbermen were much less dependent on railroads than their US counterparts. This is lucky, since the Canadian Pacific Railroad was built well after the transcontinental projects south of the border. Defebaugh says the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence complex, “reaching from the head of Lake Superior to the Atlantic, with the never-failing streams flowing into it from the north, gives an adequate outlet for the timber and lumber production of Quebec and Ontario,” while the maritime provinces easily use ocean transport (59). He also mentions that before the age of rails, northern New England industry also fed this system: “Indeed, up to the time of the construction of the Champlain Canal, connecting Lake Champlain with the Hudson River, which was completed in 1822, and of the Oswego Canal, connecting Lake Ontario at Oswego with the Erie Canal at Syracuse, N.Y., completed in 1828, timber grown on the St. Lawrence Watershed of New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, largely went to Montreal or Quebec and thence abroad” (60). This is an interesting glimpse into the importance of subsidiary canals to the Erie, and also to the pre-rail movement or products on the US-Canadian border.

The varying porosity of the border remains an important element of this forest history, it seems. In 1820 (before the canals mentioned above), the British House of Commons commissioned an inquiry into the timber imported into Lower Canada from Lake Champlain and exported to Britain under the preferential tariff Canada received as a colony. The report found that between 1800 and 1820 (a period that included the Embargo and the War of 1812) about 11 million feet of red and white pine timber, 35 million feet of pine plank and about 9 million feet of pine boards were imported into Lower Canada from Lake Champlain (currently, lumber is designated as a plank if it has parallel faces that are higher and longer than wide. A board currently has a width of less than 2.5 inches and a thickness less than 1.5 inches, but this may have been different in the past. 102). 

Defebaugh describes the Ottawa River as the “great avenue of the lumber trade” and mentions its role as the boundary between Quebec and Ontario makes the river central to how the lumber industry developed differently in Upper and Lower Canada. He says that the Ottawa watershed was not only rich timberland but was valued as farmland, which led to early and extensive clearing. The rapids immediately above the city of Ottawa provided power for early milling, before the age of steam. One of the early pioneers of the lumber trade in the region, Defebaugh mentions, was the American entrepreneur, Philemon Wright (1760-1839), who floated his first raft of timber down the river to Quebec in 1807. He also mentions British regulations reserving “masting or other timber fit for the use of the royal navy” and even restricting settlement until surveys had determined the extent of these resources (159). Reserving tall pines for naval use had been a British policy from the earliest era of colonization, and was ofter a source of conflict.

Defebaugh says that by the mid-1830s there was little pine left in the northeastern US except in remote regions of Maine, which led US speculators to buy about a million acres of Canadian timberlands in 1835-6. He continues with a description of the increasing US demand  for Canadian lumber, a reciprocity treaty in 1854, and then a series of negotiations and disputes throughout the second half of the nineteenth century over tariffs. The Civil War “created a great demand for Canadian lumber at high prices, though the trade received a setback in 1866 by the abrogation of the reciprocity treaty” (172). There’s clearly a lot to understand here, regarding the movement of both lumber and timber across the US-Canadian border. 

By 1870 the Canadian lumber industry was “mainly centered in the Ottawa Valley and on the upper waters of the Trent River and waters tributary to the Georgian Bay” (175). The period of Canadian “prosperity reached its climax in 1873”, which coincided with “the rise of the great lumbering industry of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota,” where output reached nearly 4 billion feet in 1873. After a dip at the beginning of the “Long Depression” that began with the Panic of 1873, northern US production continued to rise; reaching a peak in 1892 at 8,594,222,802 feet (176). To support increasing demand as Michigan forests began to be depleted, the US began to look to Canada to supply timber for its mills. The Canadians, for their part, preferred to ship finished lumber rather than raw timber; so a study of the change in proportions of raw to finished shipments could shed light on the relative control of the two parties in the negotiation. 

In the last decade of the 19th century, Michigan lumber businesses around Saginaw began buying large quantities of Canadian logs from Georgian Bay, which were rafted across Lake Huron. By the middle of the decade, up to 300 million feet were being shipped to Saginaw mills until a new law required logs cut on Crown lands to be processed in-country. This caused a lot of US firms to shift some of their operations to Ontario.

The next section of the book covers the US forests and industry. I’ll cover that section soon. 

(Image: Ottawa River by Kmusser, CC-BY-SA)