As part of the “Our State, Our Forests” series, Mainstreet Radio’s Leif Enger presents a report on the history of the timber industry in Minnesota. Timber was far and away the biggest industry in the state…and it changed the very landscape we live in.
There are few places anymore you can walk the kind of forests that covered northern Minnesota a hundred fifty years ago. Giant white pines rose to 200 feet. When Minnesota became a state, more than half its land was in deep shade. Though vast, the great North Woods weren't limitless. By the turn of the century, Minnesota timber was being marketed from New York to Denver. The expanding frontier needed wood and 30,000 lumberjacks were doing their best to supply it.
“Our State, Our Forests: Timbering in Minnesota” is a series of reports where Minnesota Public Radio examines what these changes mean for the state's timber industry, trees, and wildlife.
Transcripts
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LEIF ENGER: There's a woods north of Grand Rapids called the Lost 40. In an age when policymakers argue whether a tree is old growth at 90 years or 120, the Lost 40 is the real thing. It's never been cut. Some of these white pines are 400 years old. In the 1830s, 3.5 million acres of Minnesota forest were dominated by such pines. But the Lost 40, says forester Chuck Wingard, is still here only because of a mistake.
CHUCK WINGARD: It was a surveying error, and the area that we're looking at was mismeandered as part of Coddington Lake. So since it showed in the survey records as lake, nobody could buy it. And if they couldn't buy it, they couldn't cut the timber from it. So it's here for us to see it today.
Traditionally we measure them four and a half feet from the ground, so that's approximately here. And our diameter on this one is 39.6 inches. Circumference is 10.9 feet. You're probably looking at 2,000 board feet of lumber in a tree that size.
LEIF ENGER: 400 years old. 2,000 board feet. Enough in one tree for a two-stall garage, or a century ago, a small barn, farmhouse, or church. In 1837, a treaty with Ojibwe Indians, the same treaty now being contested over hunting and fishing rights, opened a large triangle of East Central Minnesota to logging. But the heyday was still 50 years off. Most of the timber being used to build the American frontier was being cut in the abundant pine forests of Michigan and Wisconsin. What jumpstarted the timber trade in Minnesota was a potent union of technology and demand.
SKIP DRAKE: Steam power began to replace water power in the sawmills. Before this time, you had to be close to a watercourse of some kind, preferably a falls, St. Anthony Falls, to create water pressure to allow for sawmills.
LEIF ENGER: Skip Drake is director of the Forest History Center, a logging museum in Grand Rapids.
SKIP DRAKE: Steam began to be applied to the sawmilling business, which allowed sawmills to locate virtually any place, up towards Duluth, Cloquet, Brainerd, Bemidji. So they're closer to the resource.
LEIF ENGER: Simultaneously, the pine forests of Michigan and Wisconsin began to give out. The lumber companies saw Minnesota as the new El Dorado, a promised land of pines. With settlements springing up across the northern plains, there wasn't just a demand for wood. There was desperation for it.
SKIP DRAKE: Certainly logging and lumbering had been going on for 50 years, but it hadn't begun to highball. And that's what happened in the 1880s. And you needed good, cheap lumber to help build this country. Minnesota at the turn of the century was the king of white pine logging.
LEIF ENGER: And the white pine was king of Minnesota's economy. In 1901, when Teddy Roosevelt took office, 30,000 lumberjacks were working in the forest. They were European immigrants and part-time farmers who slept two to a bunk in the logging camps and ate enormous breakfasts-- yes, pancakes-- before heading out to the woods. Small wonder the lumberjack is an epic figure. The trees were epic, often 200 feet tall and six feet wide waist-high. Even the way they fell was epic.
SPEAKER 1: Once I got hit in the face and cut my lips. A branch punched through my cheek and knocked out a bunch of teeth. I was cutting the tree down, and it fell over on top of me. And that morning, it was about 30 below. It broke my leg, too. Had to crawl out about a half a mile. Spent 90 days in the hospital. Pretty goofy, wasn't it?
LEIF ENGER: Each pair of lumberjacks might cut only a few dozen trees per day, using an eight-foot crosscut saw and a team of horses to drag out the logs. But so large was the workforce, and so numerous the camps, it soon became plain that white pine was no endless resource.
SKIP DRAKE: People really began to know as early as the 1860s, 1870s that the forests were exhaustible. Think about it. They were exhaustible back in Maine in the 1800s, the turn of that century. Clearly they knew that the pine would not last. But the old axiom is that the plow follows the ax. And it happened in those states, and it happened in the Ohio River Valley, and even in neighboring Wisconsin it happened. And the true belief was that farming would come here to Northern Minnesota and be successful.
LEIF ENGER: So much of Minnesota's forest lands changed into cultivated fields, pastures, and meadows. Old photographs show the towering white pine stands of Superior's north shore laid bare. But farming was to fail in much of Northern Minnesota. And as lumbermen moved on into the Arrowhead and Mississippi headwaters, the plow wasn't the only thing following the ax. Jeanne Coffee is director of the Hinckley Fire Museum.
JEANNE COFFEE: All they wanted was the trunk of the tree. They didn't want the tops. They didn't want the branches. So that was left to lay. That became known as slash. Any spark from a train or any lightning strikes or anything could really start a fire very spontaneously with this very dry slash.
LEIF ENGER: In August of 1894, General CC Andrews of the US Army made a speech to timber industry leaders. He'd just returned from studying forestry techniques in Sweden and he was alarmed. If the lumber companies didn't change their practices, he warned, the Midwest would go up in flames. Nine days later, part of it did.
JEANNE COFFEE: You can still find stumps from the fire. You can still see, for instance, where these enormous trees were just blown right out of the earth. And even today, if you dig down into the town of Hinckley, you can see the fire line. It's about a foot down. And you can see the black fire line, and it's built right on cinders from the fire.
LEIF ENGER: The Great Hinckley Fire was like nothing the state had ever seen. Traveling faster than a horse could gallop, it blackened 400 square miles in four hours. It burned, besides Hinckley, the towns of Sandstone, Mission Creek, Pokegama, Miller, and Askov. The glow of the fire was visible from Iowa. An anonymous survivor wrote this account of escaping the blaze in a shallow creek.
SPEAKER 2: As we got in the water, a bunch of confused deer raced past us right into the blast that roared over us in seconds. Wilson was in the middle with a wet, coarse wool sock held over his mouth with his left hand. With his right, he splashed water over us and the creek bank. I went under as the water sizzled with the rain of firebrands. That warmed the water and killed the fish in seconds. I breathed through my wet shirt when I came up for air.
LEIF ENGER: The Hinckley fire killed 413 people. It was front-page news nationwide, and in Europe, where articles appeared with grim pencil drawings depicting oxidized bodies amid smoking ruins. It also helped arouse a national debate over how to manage forests. Early conservationists, including Sierra Club founder John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, began to argue for federal regulation of timber. Some, like General Andrews and Gifford Pinchot, lobbied for a replanting and rotation cutting, old ideas in Europe, but revolutionary in America. Char Miller is a historian with Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
CHAR MILLER: We can see the transfer of ideas and transfer of technologies. The late 19th, early 20th century was a really fertile moment for the United States in which many, many ideas much like these were pouring across the North Atlantic and really transforming the way Americans understood the world.
LEIF ENGER: So began the environmental debate that endures to this day-- how much of the forest should be used and how much left alone? In 1892, John Muir founded the Sierra Club to proclaim the aesthetic values of pristine woods. His friend Gifford Pinchot thought pristine was well and good, but didn't put bread on the table. Pinchot, a skillful politician, lobbied for controlled logging, mining, and grazing in national forests. Teddy Roosevelt named him head of the brand-new US Forest Service. And while he did push for reforestation, Minnesota's white pines continued to be cut at unsustainable rates.
LYNN ROGERS: There's no way that the economic value of the white pines, that people could stop that locomotive.
LEIF ENGER: Lynn Rogers is a former Forest Service biologist and founder of the Ely-based White Pine Society. In the 1920s, concerns over the loss of the giant trees led to a massive replanting program. But there was a problem. American nurseries didn't have enough space to raise the seedlings.
LYNN ROGERS: So they sent seed over to Europe to be grown in the European nurseries. And when they brought those seedlings back for planting, they carried European white pine blister rust.
LEIF ENGER: When some of those seedlings died of blister rust, Rogers says, the whole effort was dropped. Sometimes red pines were planted in their place, sometimes nothing at all. In many cases, white pine clearcuts came up in aspen and other aggressive species. By the mid-1930s, Minnesota's white pine sawlog era was finished. While the pulp and paper industry remained, most lumber companies moved on to the next El Dorado, the Pacific Northwest.
They left behind mill towns they'd brought to existence, hundreds of marginal farms, and thousands of unemployed loggers. They also left behind a forest changing over to aspen and other fast-growing species, trees that would become the focus for Minnesota's second great wave of logging a century after the first. Leif Enger, Minnesota Public Radio.