Timber and the Stanislaus: The Other Sierra Industry

The gold that brought the first wave of settlers to the Groveland area was exhausted within a generation, but the forests were not. The Sierra Nevada timber industry began as miners who needed lumber to shore up their shafts and sluice their gravel built sawmills wherever the trees were large enough and the water fast enough to run the saws. By the eighteen eighties, the gold rush had become a timber rush, and the lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada were being cut at rates that alarmed even people who had grown up in logging economies.

Flumes carried logs down mountain grades to mills in the valley, gravity doing the heavy work that wagons could not. Lumber companies operated timber tracts in the national forest lands east of Groveland through the twentieth century, employing a significant portion of the local workforce and shaping the economic culture of the community through periods when tourism was thin and the mining economy was memory. The Stanislaus National Forest, which surrounds Groveland on most sides, was set aside in eighteen ninety-seven as a forest reserve, in part to protect Sierra Nevada watersheds.

The conflict between extracting timber and protecting watersheds defined the political life of communities like Groveland for more than a century, a tension between those whose livelihoods came from the forest and those who needed what the forest held.