White Pine and the Cutover, The Lumber Era That Remade Wisconsin

Stand in the northern Wisconsin forest today and you are standing in a second growth. The original forest is gone. It was taken in roughly forty years.

After the Civil War, the demand for lumber in the growing cities of Chicago, Saint Louis, and the prairie towns of Iowa and Kansas seemed inexhaustible. Wisconsin's north woods held an answer: hundreds of miles of white pine, great straight trees that could run eighty feet to the first branch, close-grained and light and perfect for framing houses. The lumber companies arrived in the eighteen sixties and did not stop until the trees were gone.

The industry was enormous. By the eighteen eighties, Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire and Wausau and Oshkosh were among the busiest lumber-producing cities in the world. Oshkosh alone, on Lake Winnebago, was known as the Sawdust Capital of the World, crowded with dozens of lumber and shingle mills by the eighteen seventies. Log drivers rode the current down the Wisconsin and the Chippewa and the Wolf rivers every spring. The river drivers were among the most dangerous occupations in America: riding floating logs through rapids, breaking up logjams with peavey hooks, losing men to the cold water and the crushing weight of timber.

The cut peaked around eighteen ninety-five and collapsed over the following decade. By nineteen ten, the cutover was complete: three million acres of slash and stumps where the old forest had been. Promoters tried to convince immigrant farmers that the stump land was farmable. It mostly was not. The great Cutover became one of the most economically depressed regions in the early twentieth century, abandoned farms, subsistence poverty, a landscape that took generations to heal.

The forest came back slowly. The Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, established in the early nineteen hundreds from what had been private timber land, covers one and a half million acres today. It is not the original forest. The species mix is different, the trees younger, the silence of old growth replaced by the noise of second growth. But it is something. A forest returned to the land that wanted one.