The Longleaf Pine Port: Pensacola's Lumber Boom

In the eighteen eighties, Pensacola was one of the busiest lumber export ports in the American South, and the forests that made it possible stretched hundreds of miles into the Florida and Alabama interior.

Longleaf pine was the engine. The longleaf forest that once blanketed the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas was already being cut at an enormous pace. West Florida's stands were among the last great reserves. Sawmills along the rivers south of Pensacola ran night and day, and the logs came downriver to the bay, where sixteen wharves stretched along more than three miles of waterfront.

The numbers were staggering for their era. In eighteen eighty and eighteen eighty-one alone, five hundred twenty-nine ships called at Pensacola to carry away three hundred nineteen thousand tons of pine lumber. In the twenty-year period between eighteen seventy-five and eighteen ninety-five, the port shipped more than four billion board feet of lumber valued at approximately fifty million dollars.

The industry drew workers from across the region, including a large labor force of African American sawmill workers whose conditions and wages were shaped by the same racial hierarchies that governed everything else in the post-Reconstruction South. The mills were dangerous. The pay was low. The company towns that sprang up around the inland mills exercised near-total control over workers' daily lives.

By the early nineteen hundreds, the great longleaf forest was essentially gone. The cut-over land was too acidic and too stripped to recover easily. Pensacola's lumber export trade collapsed with the forests that had fed it, and the port reinvented itself around naval stores, then the naval base, then commercial fishing and petrochemical shipping.

The stumps are still out there in the piney woods north of town, enormous cylinders of old-growth wood that took three centuries to grow and a generation to fell.