Two Billion Board Feet: The Logging of Cheat Mountain
Near Snowshoe, West Virginia
In the late eighteen hundreds, investors looking at Cheat Mountain and its neighbors saw something extraordinary: millions of acres of old-growth red spruce and hemlock that no railroad had yet reached. When the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway pushed its Greenbrier Division up the valley, reaching the company town of Cass in the early nineteen hundreds, the logging began in earnest. The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company built a sawmill at Cass said to be the largest double-band sawmill in the world at its peak, and constructed a network of logging railroads that spread across Cheat and Back Allegheny mountains.
By the time the operation ended around nineteen sixty, the mill at Cass alone is estimated to have processed about one billion two hundred and fifty million board feet of lumber. That figure is almost beyond imagining. The ancient red spruce forest that had grown across this mountain for centuries was cleared in roughly fifty years.
The mountain was left barren and abandoned. The recovery that followed was slow. Today, decades into restoration efforts, the spruce forest near the summit is returning, but the trees are young compared to what once grew here.
The names of the ski runs at Snowshoe still carry the vocabulary of the era that stripped the mountain: Skidder, Ball Hooter, Grab Hammer, the working language of the men who came before.
