Flagstaff's Timber Empire and the Forest That Survived It

In the eighteen eighties, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad arrived in northern Arizona and needed ties. Lots of them. The ponderosa pine forests of the Flagstaff plateau were among the densest stands of that species in North America, and the timber industry arrived almost immediately after the rail line. By the eighteen nineties, Flagstaff was one of the largest lumber-producing towns in the American Southwest, and two brothers from Ohio named Michael and Timothy Riordan had built the largest sawmill operation in the region.

The Riordans cut timber, married into a lumber dynasty, and built themselves a forty-room mansion in Flagstaff that stands today as a state park. Their company, the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company, ran mills that operated continuously from the eighteen nineties until the nineteen fifties, cutting the ponderosa forests of the Coconino Plateau for sixty years.

Coconino National Forest was established in nineteen oh eight, the same decade that much of the federal forest reserve system was being formalized under Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt's conservation push. The forest boundary drew a line around what remained, setting the terms under which commercial logging could continue under federal regulation rather than at private discretion. Some of what was already cut stayed cut. The Coconino today covers nearly one point nine million acres, and the ponderosa pine forests, while substantially altered from their pre-European configuration, remain the defining ecology of the plateau above the canyon country.

The Riordan mansion at the edge of downtown Flagstaff is one of the largest remaining examples of Arts and Crafts architecture in the Southwest. The logs that built it came from the forest you can see from the front windows.