Scotia, California: Redwood Company Town

The ground under Scotia belonged for centuries to the Wailaki people, one of the Eel River Athapaskan nations, who fished the Eel River, gathered acorns in the redwood forest, and traded dentalia shells across northern California. European-American settlers pushed them out by the eighteen sixties.

In eighteen sixty-three, investors bought six thousand acres of timberland here, and the Pacific Lumber Company took over the operation by eighteen sixty-nine. They built their first sawmill in eighteen eighty-seven, renamed the camp Scotia after the Nova Scotian heritage of many workers, and turned it into a model company town: company-owned homes, a company hospital, a company theater. For nearly a century, Pacific Lumber was known for conservative, sustainable logging.

Then in nineteen eighty-six, the financier Charles Hurwitz completed a hostile takeover financed with junk bonds. To pay the debt, he doubled the harvest of old-growth redwoods and raided the employee pension fund. The ancient trees fell at twice the rate they had for generations. The town that had been built on the redwoods was now consuming the last of them.