The Douglas Fir Empire: Timber and the Forests That Fed a Nation

Frederick Weyerhaeuser spent forty-two years in the lumber business before he bought the largest single private timberland transaction in American history. On January third, nineteen hundred, he purchased nine hundred thousand acres of Pacific Northwest forest from the Northern Pacific Railway for six dollars an acre. The trees were Douglas fir, western red cedar, and Sitka spruce, some of the tallest and straightest timber on earth. Weyerhaeuser was sixty-five years old. He said he had been waiting for the right opportunity.

The Douglas fir forests of Oregon and Washington were unlike anything the American lumber industry had encountered before. The trees grew to two hundred and fifty feet and higher. Individual specimens were centuries old. The forests ran from the coast to the Cascades in an almost unbroken canopy, and the industry that moved into them after the railroads arrived, the transcontinental lines reached Oregon in the early eighteen eighties, was built for volume in a way that had already cleared most of the Great Lakes and the Southeast.

The logging camps of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were cities in the forest. Bull teams of oxen, then steam-powered donkey engines, then high-lead logging cables strung between spar trees. The technology of the industry evolved fast, because the forests were vast enough to reward ingenuity. A skilled choker setter could earn more in a week than a schoolteacher earned in a month, and the camps recruited accordingly. The communities that grew around the mills, from Astoria to Coos Bay to the mill towns of the Willamette Valley, were shaped entirely by the timber economy.

The forests were not infinite, though they were treated as if they might be. By the mid-twentieth century, the old-growth stands that had taken three and four and five centuries to grow were being logged at a rate that could not be sustained. The timber industry employed more Oregonians than any other sector for much of the twentieth century, and its political weight in the statehouse and the congressional delegation was absolute.

The conflict over what remained of the old-growth forests came to a head in the late nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties over a small spotted owl. The northern spotted owl required old-growth forest to survive. The federal Endangered Species Act required the government to protect species that required old-growth forest to survive. The resulting legal battles over logging on federal lands effectively ended large-scale old-growth harvesting in Oregon. The timber towns that had grown up around it did not disappear, but they shrank, and they changed, and many of them have not finished figuring out what they are now.

The trees that are left are extraordinary. Driving through western Oregon today, what you see through the window is largely second and third growth, younger and more uniform, replanted in managed rows. The original forests exist now in fragments in the national forests and a handful of protected groves. What they were, at the scale they were, is something that can be read about but not quite imagined.