The Wood That Built the Valley

Eugene's first sawmill opened in eighteen fifty-one, five years after the first settler filed a claim. The timing was not a coincidence. The Willamette Valley sits at the western edge of one of the great coniferous forests on earth, and the Douglas fir that covers the Coast Range and the western Cascades was, in the mid-nineteenth century, the largest-diameter timber most arriving Americans had ever seen. A tree that would be considered a forest giant in the eastern states was routine here.

The timber industry grew steadily through the late nineteenth century and exploded in the early twentieth as railroads reached Lane County and opened markets in California and beyond. By the middle of the twentieth century, nearly half of Lane County's workforce of fifty-six thousand people was employed in some aspect of the lumber trade, working the mills in Springfield, Cottage Grove, and dozens of smaller towns that existed largely because of a mill.

The work was dangerous and the wages were never high enough to feel secure. Gyppo logging, the practice of contracting out small crews to cut specific tracts, kept many families in a state of chronic economic uncertainty that had little to do with how hard they worked.

The industry began a long contraction in the nineteen eighties, driven by a combination of mill automation, old-growth exhaustion, and the legal battles over the northern spotted owl and its old-growth habitat requirements. The political fights over that contraction were fierce, and they changed the character of Oregon's congressional delegation and its internal politics for a generation. That chapter of the story involves genuine losses on multiple sides, and it is not one that admits easy summary.

What remains is a region that was built by timber money, where the relationship between forest and economy is not abstract but personal and often painful.