INDUSTRIAL IMPACTS
ON THE FORESTS OF THE
UNITED STATES
1860-1920
Y 11IICH4EL WILLIAMS
Painting by Robert Lavin, FHS collection.
There is no other interest of the country so great as that of the forests ,
considered from the commercial or pecuniary point of view,
while in other aspects [their] value is altogether beyond computation .
Nathaniel H. Egleston, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forestry Division, 1884
T
he forest was an overwhelmingly important sourc e
of raw materials for industry and for fuel in the
United States during the latter half of the nine-
teenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. In 1865
Thomas Starr calculated that wood and its derivatives paid
"more than one-half of the entire internal revenue of the
United States?' Merely thirty years later, Nathaniel Egle-
ston's further elaborate computations led him broadly t o
the same conclusion : "Our cars and ships are the product s
of the forests. The thousand tools of our various handi-
crafts, the machineries of our factories, the conveniences of
our warehouse, and the comfort and adornments of ou r
dwellings are largely the product of our forests . Behind all
the varied industries and conveniences of life stand th e
forests as their chief source and support."'
1. Thomas Starr, 'American Forests : Their Destruction and Preser-
vation;' in the U.S. Department of Agriculture Annual Report for 1865
(Washington, D .C.: GPO, 1866), p. 23; U.S. Department of Agriculture ,
Annual Report for 1883 (Washington, D .C.: GPO, 1884), pp. 452-53.
108 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY / JULY 1987
The relative importance of industrial wood consump-
tion cannot be measured precisely because the total
amount of wood consumed by all users-especially th e
amount harvested by domestic farmer-producers-is diffi-
cult to ascertain . Nevertheless, a reasonable and probabl y
conservative estimate is that total consumption for fuel ,
lumber, pulp, veneer, poles, and other purposes stood at
3.76 billion cubic feet per annum in 1859, nearly double d
to 6.84 cubic feet in 1879, and very nearly doubled again
during the next twenty-seven years to reach 13.38 billion
cubic feet in 1907. This figure was never reached again;
consumption has hovered between 10 and 11 billion cubic
feet per annum throughout the twentieth century .2
Figure 1 shows the breakdown of individual uses as a
percentage of the whole. Miscellaneous demands on th e
2. Dr. Marion Clawson, Resources for the Future, Washington ,
D.C., personal communication, 23 October 1980. Data on fuel use are
estimates; totals could include fuel for mechanical-energy generation.
PLYWOOD AN D
VENEER
LOGS
EXPORTED
Figure 1. Utilization of wood grown in the United States, by round wood equivalent, 1800 to 1975. Major uses are expresse d
as percentages of the total (based on Marion Clawson, personal communication) . All figures accompanying this article were
provided by the author; see footnotes to text for full source citations.
forests, such as poles and piling, were always important :
even such a seemingly trivial item as the wood for lead
pencils consumed 110,000 tons of redcedar per annum .
The gross volume of lumber did not equal that of fuel until
after 1890, and fuel cut for domestic and industrial use s
rarely fell below one-third of all timber cut until after 1922 .
New industrial uses for wood, such as pulp making, began
to appear around the turn of the century, so that industrial
demand remained important.
The American dependence on wood was overwhelming
and ubiquitous. Wood entered into every walk of life. Of
its many uses, three are examined here : wood as fuel for
warming the home; wood converted to charcoal for use i n
making iron; and wood consumed by railroads, both as
fuel for steam locomotives and as ties in the network o f
tracks that splayed across the nation and bound its econ-
omy together.
Changes in Fuel Use
Fuel for domestic hearths, charcoal-fired iron furnaces ,
and mechanical and locomotive energy was still an impor-
tant product of the forest during the closing years of th e
nineteenth century. Lumber began to outweigh fuel as a
percentage of overall forest products only when, between
1880 and 1890, the flow of cheap sawtimber from th e
South gathered momentum . Although the relative impor-
tance of fuelwood was declining in this period, the absolute
amount of fuelwood consumed increased in every year up
to 1933, with a brief decline in a handful of years durin g
the later 1920s. The availability and cheapness of wood in
rural areas made it the ideal fuel, and wood consumptio n
only dropped off when electrification became generally
available in rural areas in the mid-1930s .
Of course wood was gradually supplanted by other fue l
sources such as coal, oil, and gas during the late nineteent h
century, so that fuelwood consumption declined . The total
demand for energy experienced a sustained growth an d
expansion, increasing seventeenfold between 1850 and
1955. The choice of specific fuels depended upon local
availability, comparative price, advances in technology o f
production and utilization, and shifts in consumer prefer-
ence. Fuelwood accounted for four-fifths of energy as late
as 1860, but by the mid-1880s coal overtook it as the prin -
cipal source. By 1900 fuelwood was probably contributing
only one-fifth of the nation's energy needs, and by 1920 a
mere 7.5 percent. By this time coal too had passed its peak ,
and use of oil and natural gas was rising. By 1955 oil and
natural gas accounted for nearly two-thirds of total energy
consumption (figure 2).3 Nevertheless, fuelwood's share o f
5.4 percent in 1940 was equivalent to nearly 4 billion cubic
feet of timber, more than in any year in the nineteent h
century except 1899 .
Domestic Hearths
Between 1860 and 1910 approximately 151.6 million
acres of forestland were cleared, which at the very modest
estimate of twenty cords per acre yielded the astronomica l
figure of over three billion cords of wood. This output
could have supplied at least half of the total national con-
sumption of fuelwood during the same years . 4 The short-
fall was presumably made up by recutting woodlots and
by the waste from lumber production, although as time
went on, the mills found increasingly imaginative ways to
use every scrap of wood. In addition, pulp production
began to consume more and more small timber from
lumbering.
Cutting remained a profitable sideline for farmers, who
continued to spend up to one-third of their time cutting ,
3. Sam H . Schurr and Bruce C. Netschert, Energy in the America n
Economy, 1850-1975: an Economic Study of Its History and Prospects
(Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press for Resources for
the Future, Inc ., 1960), pp. 36-47.
4. Robert V. Reynolds and Albert H . Pierson, Fuel Wood Used in the
United States, 1630-1930, U.S. Department of Agriculture Circular 641
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1942), pp. 8-10.
INDUSTRIAL IMPACTS 109
100 -

- 100
0

1 T 0
1850 1860

1870 1880

1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950

1960
Figure 2. Energy sources in the United States as a percentage of total energy consumption, by five-year periods, 1850-1960 (based o n
Schurr and Netschert, Energy in the American Economy, pp. 36-37).
hauling, and splitting timber, particularly during th e
winter months when they could do little else. The tenth
national census itemizes the number of cords cut on farm s
only, and also the value of the cut, for the year 1879 . 5 This
total, 51.4 million cords, falls far short of the total 140.5
million cords of wood that Charles Sargent estimated were
consumed in the United States during 1879 .6 Much of the
additional wood counted by Sargent must have come fro m
land cleared for new farm holdings and by commercial
lumbering, both kinds of activity that did not enter into the
census takers' count of small-scale woodcutting on existing
farms.
The average American used prodigious amounts o f
timber to warm himself during the long winter months.
Sam Schurr and Bruce Netshert calculate that during the
mid-nineteenth century the average family needed 17.5
cords of wood per annum to keep comfortably warm, and
Sargent in 1879 put it higher at 22.5 cords per family of
five, or 4.56 cords per capita per annum.' Whatever the
true amount per family- and it surely varied according t o
location, family size, and type of wood used-locally
enormous areas of the forests were stripped clean. John
Thomas of New York gave an example of one landholde r
who had thus transformed "over one hundred acres of land,
once densely covered with timber, but now entirely cleared
5. U.S. Census Office, Report on the Production of Agriculture, vol.
3 of the Tenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO,
1883), pp. 251-327.
6. Charles S. Sargent, Report on the Forests of North America, vol.
9 of the Tenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C. : GPO,
1884), p. 489.
7. Schurr and Netschert, Energy in the American Economy, p. 49;
Sargent, Report on the Forests of North America, p. 489. HenryS. Graves,
The Use of Wood for Fuel, U.S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin 753
(Washington, D.C. : GPO, 1919), pp. 2-6, calculates that the consumptio n
was 12.6 cords "per farm."
110 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY / JULY 1987
for the sole purpose of supplying his family with firewood
during the forty years he had resided there."'
D
espite the relative abundance and low cost of wood ,
coal (particularly anthracite) began to supplant wood
in the urban areas and near the coalfields . This was partly
because wood became scarce near the urban areas after th e
centuries of clearing around them . More importantly,
wood storage was problematic as living space shrank in th e
cities, especially as wood was still being delivered in the
traditional measure of the four-foot cord. Coal weighed
less and was less bulky in relation to its energy content tha n
wood-by a factor of as much as one-third or a half again.
An additional problem was that the traditional woo d
measure did not fit easily into the new stoves that were no w
common in most houses.'
During the late 1850s, the invention of central heating -
household furnaces in the cellars of urban dwellings for
heating the whole or part of the house or apartment-
increased the demand for large and reliable quantities o f
fuel. As early as 1830, shipments of coal from Pennsylvania
went up and down the east coast, and urban fuel dealers
increasingly changed from "wood" dealers to "coal an d
wood" dealers. They began to cut firewood into fifteen -
inch lengths, which would fit into the new stoves. The
increased construction of apartment houses in the citie s
during the last decades of the century brought further
changes. Few, if any, had open fireplaces, both because o f
the fire risk and because space was too valuable to store
wood that would be used only in the cold season . By the
8. John J. Thomas,'"Culture and Management of Forest Trees;' in
the U.S. Department ofAgriculture's Annual Report for 1864 (Washing-
ton, D.C.: GPO, 1865), p. 43.
9. William Hoglund, "Forest Conservation and Stove Inventors ,
1750-1850; Forest History 5 (Winter 1962): 2-8.
Figure 3. Type of fuel used in the United States, circa 1880 (based on Sargent, Report on the Forests of North America, pp. 488-89).
late 1930s fuel dealers along the Atlantic Coast had ceased
to handle firewood at all°
The diffusion of coal as a fuel in nineteenth-centur y
America is shown in figure 3, which represents a stage
beyond that of initial penetration . By 1880 coal predomi-
nated as the main fuel in five main areas: New York and
its immediate environs ; the Hudson Valley, Massachusetts, '
and eastern Pennsylvania; western Pennsylvania and east-
ern Ohio; northern Illinois and western Iowa ; and along
the Platte and Arkansas rivers in Nebraska and Kansas . In
addition, coal was the domestic fuel in nearly every cit y
with a population over fifteen thousand . One example of
the local change to coal must stand for many. In Fairfield
County in southern Ohio it was said in the early 1880s that
"wood is not used for fuel more than half as much as it wa s
eight or ten years ago. Many farmers having timber on their
lands find it cheaper and more convenient to buy and burn
coal." 11
Around the core areas of coal use lay a broad belt wher e
coal made some inroads as a fuel but wood still predomi-
nated, stretching from eastern Nebraska and Kansas across
the continent to New York and Pennsylvania . The rest of
10. Arthur H. Cole, "The Mystery of Fuel Wood Marketing in th e
United States, Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970) : 339-59.
11. Ohio State Forestry Association, Proceedings of the Ohio State
Forestry Association Meeting, Columbus, March 28th, 1884, together
with a Report Upon the Forest Condition of Ohio (Columbus: G. J. Brand
& Co., State Printers, 1884), p. 166.
the settled portion of the country constituted a third zone
where the fuel used was "practically all wood" : across the
entire South and West, and throughout Wisconsin, Minne -
sota, Michigan, Indiana, and inland Maine1 2
The evidence suggests that the picture presented b y
figure 3 did not alter much during the next few decades .
Coal consumption went up and wood consumption
dropped slightly, and coal penetrated the intermediate zone
across the Northeast and the growing urban areas, wher-
ever they were located . By 1908 consumption of wood may
well have dropped to 84.1 million cords, with four-fifths
of the consumption being on farms. The weight of farm
consumption in proportion to total wood consumption
reached nearly 95 percent in the agricultural states of the
South and the West, and was as low as 60 percent in the
vicinity of the intensely industrial portions of the North -
east13
W
orld War I, however, brought a renewed thoug h
short-lived interest in the subject of fuelwood an d
the management of woodlots by farmers. The war diverted
manpower and caused an actual shortage of coal during
the winter of 1917-18 . Measures to conserve fuel and
reduce transportation costs focused attention on the forests
that still remained after the great clearing as a source of fue l
12. Sargent, Report on the Forests of North America, p. 489.
13. Reynolds and Pierson, Fuel Wood Used in the United States, pp.
17-18.
INDUSTRIAL IMPACTS 111
Figure 4. Proportion of farms in the east-
ern United States covered by woodlot, 1910
(based on Frothingham, The Status and
Value of Farm Woodlots in the Eastern
United States, pp. 4-5).
for the nation. Consumption of fuelwood went up by at
least a quarter-from 82 .7 million cords to 102.9 million
cords in 1917, and wood was seen to be "coming into its ow n
again." The Forest Service and state foresters actively
campaigned among farmers, urging them to increase th e
amount of fuelwood cut as a means of combating a
national emergency and as a part of good farm practice .
Coal, however, had penetrated so far into the urba n
market that there was now little chance of wood winnin g
back a share. The bulk and low energy-to-weight ratio of
wood made it too expensive to move overland more tha n
three miles, and wood moved more than five miles simpl y
could not compete with coal on the open market (unless
the wood dealer could use sea or river transport to cut his
cost of production). Thus farmers could use their wood
on their own farms, but could sell it at a profit only in
nearby towns and villages. New marketing schemes were
suggested to overcome the resistance of fuel merchants t o
wood, who by now had dealt with coal for so long that they
had neither the inclination nor the machinery to delive r
fuelwood, especially in the new smaller "handleable" sizes.
Proposals included selling wood by weight and not by the
confusing measure of volume as of old ; setting aside muni-
cipal forests as sources of fuel; and establishing municipal
woodyards, as actually happened in Mississippi. Virginia
took even more positive action and allowed those livin g
outside a city or incorporated town to purchase coal only
with a special permit proving that local wood was not avail-
able. But all these suggestions and actions had little perma-
nent effect. As soon as the wartime emergency ended, th e
112 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY / JULY 1987
trend of wood consumption dipped, with a temporar y
reprieve only during the depths of the Depression years? 4
Woodlots were a significant portion of the total forest,
and by 1910 they covered a staggering total of 143.3 million
acres on 4.3 million farms in the eastern United States.
Early views about their productivity were pessimistic ;s
but later assessments based on more exact appraisals of
their extent and yield were more balanced 16 The average
woodlot contained a little less than thirty acres, althoug h
sizes varied from less than five acres on small farms in New
England to one hundred fifty acres on partially cleared
holdings in northern Minnesota and South Carolina . All in
all, the woodlot was a conspicuous feature of the landscape
of the eastern United States.
Because woodlots were often a remnant of the origina l
forest left after clearing for agriculture, their area decrease d
gradually by 15 percent between 1880 and 1900, but there
were great regional variations . In New England, woodlots
grew as farms were abandoned and reverted to forest . The
same happened in the Lake States as settlement extende d
northward and boosted the area of farm woodlots by incor-
porating both cutover land and uncleared forest (figure 4) .
14. Graves, "The Use of Wood for Fuel ; pp. 1, 17-21, 33-37.
15. C. R. Tillotson, "The Woodlot : Its Present Problems and Probable
Future Use in the United States," Proceedings of the Society of America n
Foresters 11 (April 1916) : 198-208.
16. Earl H. Frothingham, The Status and Value of Farm Woodlots
in the Eastern United States, U.S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin
481 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1919) .
Figure 5. Charcoal pig-iron production, 1854-1911. Annual production is measured in thousands of gross tons ; charcoal-
produced iron is expressed as a percentage of all iron produced (based on Temin, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century
America, table C-3, pp. 268-69).
The woodlot had uses other than fuel, some of whic h
directly benefited farmers. They protected livestock during
extreme weather, especially if planted as shelterbelts . They
contained up to 15 percent of the nation's timber supply.
The full value of this lumber was rarely realized, however,
because poor management produced stands of widely vari -
able quality and because farmers knew too little abou t
timber grading to get top dollar from wood dealers.
Woodlots were the source of rough construction timber,
poles, and fencing, but above all they were a source of fuel,
worth some $170 million in 1910, double the total value o f
either the tobacco or the rye and barley crops combined . In
Vermont and New Hampshire woodlot products (mainly
fuel) were the second-ranking crop ; and in Maine, Sout h
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansa s
they were the third-ranking crop.
As late as 1940, some 7.7 million homes still used woo d
for heating, a figure that doubled to 14 million homes i n
the energy-conscious 1970s and early 1980s, underlining
the price elasticity of consumers' fuel choices and th e
abundance of wood 17
Charcoal and the Iron Industry
Charcoal, a kind of fuelwood once removed, was re -
placed by mineral fuels as America moved slowly into the
17. Frothingham, Status and Value of Farm Woodlots, pp. 1-3, 11-15 ,
29-30, 35-43. For later figures see Schurr and Netschert, Energy in the
American Economy, p. 57.
truly industrial age after the Civil War18 The proportion
of iron smelted by charcoal dropped from 45 percent of al l
iron in the mid-1850s to 25 percent at the close of the
1860s. However, its decline in percentage was within a
rapidly rising total output, which meant that iron smeltin g
by charcoal was not eliminated and fuel gathering in the
forests continued. As the economy expanded, the demand
for the versatile iron increased consistently; more was pro-
duced in nearly every year after 1860 than before, an d
production reached over half a million tons on eleven
occasions during the last couple of decades of the century,
only to decline after about 1909 (figure 5)1 9
The number of iron furnaces fell rapidly from 385 i n
1859 to a mere 33 in 1920, but this decline in numbers di d
not necessarily mean a decline in production-while th e
small preindustrial furnaces with a capacity of less tha n
two thousand tons per annum were eliminated in the older
areas of production in Pennsylvania and Ohio, increasingl y
large (twenty thousand tons capacity or more) furnace s
were built in new areas of production farther west, i n
Michigan, northwestern Wisconsin, Missouri, western
Tennessee, northern Alabama, and northwestern Georgia .
All of these areas included easily extracted iron ore an d
extensive forests (figure 6 and table 1).
18. J. Peter Lesley, The Iron Manufacturer's Guide to the Furnaces,
Forges and Rolling.Mills of the United States (New York: John Wiley,
1859), pp . 44-45.
19. Peter Temin, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An
Economic Inquiry (Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 1964), pp.
82-83, 266-67.
INDUSTRIAL IMPACTS 113
Figure 6. Location of charcoal blast furnaces in 1859, 1876, and 1890 (based on Schallenberg and Ault, "Raw Material Supply
and Technological Change in the American Charcoal Iron Industry," pp . 447-49).
The new iron furnaces differed from the old both in
appearance and efficiency. The typical, squat (thirty-foot) ,
truncated pyramid of masonry of the preindustrial furnac e
was slowly replaced by the new, narrow, chimneylike
furnace, from fifty-five to sixty feet tall. High-pressure hot
blasts could be passed more easily through these furnaces ,
which used wood fuel much more economically. Hot air
was collected from the top of the furnace rather than being
allowed to escape as in the old furnaces, and it was pumped
at high pressure by a steam engine rather than by a water-
wheel.20 The amount of charcoal needed to smelt a ton of
pig iron decreased in consequence. Antebellum furnaces
had used between 150 and 250 bushels of charcoal per to n
of ore, but the late-nineteenth-century furnace used only
between 72 and 120 bushels per ton (the median use of the
eighteen furnaces known to be operating between 1881 an d
1926 was 91 bushels per ton) .21
One problem was that the weight of the ore in the more
efficient tall furnaces caused the brittle, traditionally mad e
charcoal to crumble . That was overcome by distilling the
wood in brick kilns and iron-retort systems, which pro-
duced less ash, stronger charcoal, and also valuable and
saleable wood-chemical by-products from the condense d
gases.22
T
he charcoal industry did not stand still in the face of
competition from mineral fuels; it adopted innova-
tions fairly quickly. In fact, because charcoal was inher-
20. Richard H. Schallenberg and David A. Ault, "Raw Material
Supply and Technological Change in the American Charcoal Iron Indus -
try; Technology and Culture 18 (July 1977), pp. 436-66.
21. Alfred D. Chandler, 'Anthracite Coal and the Beginnings of th e
Industrial Revolution in the United States, Business History Review 46
(Summer 1972): 141-81; Temin, Iron and Steel, p. 65.
22. Edward H . French and James R . Withrow, "The Hardwood Dis-
tillation Industry in America;' Ohio State University Bulletin no. 19
(Columbus: Ohio State University, 1905), pp . 1-15.
114 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY / JULY 1987
ently more expensive than coal (despite the abundance o f
timber), the charcoal industry became supercompetitive,
hence its very slow death. Charcoal-using furnaces became
more like coke-using furnaces and were operated accord-
ingly, some even changing from charcoal to coke and bac k
again depending upon the availability of fuel supplies and
the price and demand for different types of iron .
With changes in technique came changes in the organi -
zation of production : the old-fashioned iron plantatio n
disappeared with the old-fashioned furnace . The iron
master using charcoal became more efficient and aggres-
sively competitive: after about 1860 he reserved his pre-
mium product for fine cutting tools, small arms, steam-
boiler tubing, crank shafts, axles and gears, and above all ,
railroad wheels, which consumed the bulk of the output .
He left the less-demanding market for rails, horseshoes,
and cruder construction bars and rods to the coke iron
manufacturer.
After about 1890, however, advances in ferrous metal-
lurgy began to catch up with charcoal iron and erode its few
remaining markets. Bessemer converters, and particularly
open-hearth steel furnaces, produced large quantities o f
high-grade steel, and the coke steel strengthened with
chrome nickel alloys competed seriously with fine iron as a
raw material for specialized products. The railroad wheel ,
in particular, succumbed to the new strengthened stee l
because it needed to withstand increasingly greater weight s
and speeds. As its main markets dried up, the charcoal iro n
industry began to falter. 23
Although the impact of the charcoal-using furnaces on
their immediate surrounding forest areas was great, no -
where did the devastation become so widespread during
23. Richard H. Schallenburg, "Evolution, Adaptation, and Survival :
The Very Slow Death of the American Charcoal Industry, Annals of
Science 32 (July 1975) : 341-58 .
Table 1. Charcoal Pig Iron Production, 1866-1910 (to nearest 1,000 tons )
MA PA OH MD KY AL MI MO WI Total
CT VA TN
NY GA
ME
1866 58 88 - 35 - 181
1872 55 45 96 50 77 13 87 46 28 497
1880 64 43 69 47 45 38 154 16 43 519
1885 34 12 18 23 42 78 143 22 20 392
1890 47 18 26 24 64 110 259 34 95 677
1895 17 5 12 15 21 102 251 225
1900 24 4 9 7 29 65 176 38 352
1910 19 5 1 2 11 40 292 73 443
From Schallenberg and Ault, "Raw Material Supply and Technological Change in the American Charcoal Iron Industry, " pp. 461-62.
the pre-Civil War years that the industry died, nor di d
charcoal become so costly that it was uneconomical to
use-both of which are conventional explanations for th e
shift of the industry to the West.24 Rather, as Richard
Schallenburg and David Ault suggest, the exhaustion of the
local iron ore in some cases, and in general the stead y
progress of the technology of steel production and manu-
facture, eventually squeezed the charcoal industry out of
existence. There is no clear evidence that the price of char-
coal was higher in the older settled areas of the East (wher e
demand was greatest) than in the newly settled areas of the
West (where supplies were most abundant) . Overall, prices
may even have decreased as superior techniques of produc-
tion gave saleable by-products . Charcoal was transported
long distances to furnaces sited close to the urban markets
for iron instead of near the supplies of fuel in the middle o f
the forests. River transport and even the railroads were used
by many furnace owners, like those near Baltimore or in
Virginia.25 And the number and capacity of furnaces in
Michigan during the 1860s and 1870s were nearly as grea t
in the largely nonforested south of the Lower Peninsula as
in the densely forested Upper Peninsula . The important
and common factor was access to the cheap high-grade ores
in the Superior Ranges, which could be moved easily onl y
by lake transport. Fuel, in comparison to iron ore, could
be and was transported cheaply overland . Charcoal was
supplied over distances of three hundred miles in Ne w
England, New York, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Michi-
gan in specially built railroad wagons.26 Indeed, transport
of fuel was an inevitable accompaniment of increasing
furnace capacity ; furnaces of thirty to forty thousand ton s
capacity per annum required that fuel be collected over a
greater radius than ever before.
Though wood exhaustion was not the primary reason
for either the shift westward or the decline of the charcoa l
iron industry during the late nineteenth century, large areas
of the forests were permanently affected by cutting for
charcoal. Depending upon the density of the trees, the
amount of land cleared varied from place to place and from
time to time. Using a modest estimate of 150 acres ofwood-
land to produce 1,000 tons of pig iron, the number of acre s
cleared to fire the furnaces must have ranged from 25,000
acres (39 square miles) per annum in a low production yea r
like 1862 to 94,000 acres (147 square miles) in a high -
production year like 1890 . Of course, many forests near the
furnaces were cut over at intervals of twenty-five to thirty
years, and sometimes less. For example, a detailed surve y
of the 837 square miles of Vinton and Jackson Countie s
in the Hanging Rock district of southeastern Ohio showed
that 60 percent ofthe forest was clearcut between 1850 and
1860, down to four-inch diameter trees, and that the forests
regenerated sufficiently for recutting during the early part
of this century. The same was true of neighboring Scioto
County, which was "originally well wooded . . . but a
large proportion was turned into the charcoal to be used for
smelting purposes in the large furnaces." However, here the
forests did not regenerate: `After the forests had been cut ,
nothing was done to ensure their rejuvenescence; cattle
were permitted to eat the young trees that came up and t o
trample over them; in some instances the cleared districts
were burned over to secure a better pasture," and con-
sequently some furnaces were abandoned for want of
charcoal.27
A clue to fuelwood rotations is the amount of woodland
reserved by the smelting companies to keep the furnaces
going permanently, an estimate that was, of course, linked
24. Temin, Iron and Steel, pp. 82-83.
25. Schallenburg and Ault, "Raw Material Supply and Technological
Change; pp. 445-46, 450; and John D. Tyler's unpublished master's
thesis on "The Charcoal Industry in Decline, 1855-1925 " (University of
Delaware, 1967).
26. Journal of the United States Ascociation of Charcoal Iron Workers
6 (1885) : 117-21.
27. Janice C . Beasley, "The Primary Forests of Jackson and Vinton
Counties; (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1953), pp. 96-108 ; Pro-
ceedings of the Ohio State Forestry Association Meeting, 1884, p. 218. For
other statistics on cutting rotations see Franklin B . Hough, ed., Report
Upon Forestry (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880), 3 :65-6' Cutting rota-
tions range from eighteen to forty years, with a median of twenty-five year s
for the seventy-five cases reported.
INDUSTRIAL IMPACTS 115
to regrowth. The acres of woodland reserved for each to n
of iron produced varied enormously, from 2.67 in Ken-
tucky to 37.3 in New York. The median value of eight
observations was five acres of woodland per ton of iron .
At the Woodstock Iron Company in Calhoun County, Ala-
bama, which produced 6,100 tons of iron per year, it wa s
said that "20,000 acres are sufficient for a permanent
supply. Lands cut over are reserved for growing another
crop and the furnace now has 4,000 acres of young trees."
At the Center Furnace in Clay County, Kentucky, which
produced 3,900 tons, it was calculated that "about 10,44 0
acres would yield a permanent supply if no accident, suc h
as fires, happened to the growing timber. Many furnaces in
Kentucky have large tracts of woodland for growing new
supplies. They are cut off once in 28-30 years." At the
Hamilton Iron Works in Monroe County, Missouri, it took
about 8.4 acres of woodland to produce a ton of iron: "The
timber being small and of slow growth, 30,000 acres would
probably be required to keep a furnace permanently sup-
plied. More than half the land in the region is good fo r
nothing except for growing timber. No second growth has
been cut and it would probably require 30 years for it to
become large enough for profitable cutting." The Cham-
plain Ore and Iron Company in Essex County, New York ,
in contrast, needed 60,000 acres of forest to produce a mere
1,600 tons of iron, although of that "30,000 acres are
reserved, and a new growth may be cut in from 10 to 2 0
years?' " Suffice it to say that the area considered necessary
for a reserve stock depended as much on the managemen t
of the timber as on the rate of regrowth .
A further and final complication is that the amount
of charcoal needed to smelt a ton of pig iron decrease d
as better smelting and charcoal-making techniques were
developed, which lessened the impact of charcoal making
on the woodlands as the years progressed . Furnaces during
the early nineteenth century consumed well over 200
bushels per ton smelted, but the amount of charcoal neede d
fell rapidly toward the end of the century . Between 1880
and 1900 it was reduced from an average of 112 .3 bushels to
81.6 bushels per ton (table 2) .
The only indication of the amount of forest destroye d
in the name of charcoal iron production is for particula r
census years. For example, in 1880 the production of
charcoal pig iron was 480,000 tons, smelted by burnin g
52,910,000 bushels of charcoal . If the charcoal from 150
acres of woodland was required to smelt 1,000 tons, then
some 72,000 acres must have been cleared in that year .
However, if the common estimate was correct that one acre
of woodland could produce between 1,000 and 1,20 0
bushels of charcoal, then only between 45,000 and 54,000
acres were cleared. Differences in the statistical transfor-
mations will clearly lead to differences in the estimates
made. An additional complication is that 15 .6 million
bushels of charcoal went into rolling and steel mills, and
28. Hough, Report Upon Forestry (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1878) ,
1:125-27. See also N. W. Lord, "Iron Manufacture of Ohio; in Economic
Geology, vol. 5 of the Report of the Geological Survey of Ohio (Colum-
bus: G. J. Brand and Co., State Printers, 1884), pp . 438-554.
116 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY / JULY 1987
Table 2. Bushels of Charcoal Used
per Ton of Iron Produced, 1880-1900
Charcoal (bushels) Pig iron (tons) Bushels per ton
1880 53,910,000 480,000 112.3 1
1890 67,672,000 628,000 107.75
1900 31,422,000 385,000 81 .61
From U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United State s
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1902), vol . 10, part 4, p. 18.
forges and bloomeries, which must have meant the clearin g
of another 13,000 to 15,600 acres .29
Because of such variables and uncertainties, one canno t
be too dogmatic about the amount of woodland cleare d
in any one year, or indeed for the whole of the nineteent h
century after the Civil War. At best we can calculate
roughly that the 20.4 million tons of charcoal iron pro-
duced between 1855 and 1910 may have required in toto th e
forest growth of 4,800 square miles of well-stocked wood-
land. If we assume a rotation of twenty-five years, that
figure drops to about 3,000 square miles . Impressive as that
amount is, however, land cleared for iron production was
only 1.3 percent of the land cleared for agriculture, and i f
charcoal for iron came from regrowth or secondary forest ,
it took a mere 0.8 percent of the forest taken by agricultural
settlement.
With this comparative perspective it can be seen tha t
charcoal iron production had relatively little impact on th e
forests of the country as a whole. However, its impact was
out of all proportion to its area because clearing for char-
coal was concentrated and thus could be seen, understood ,
and calculated easily. Unlike agricultural clearing, clearin g
for iron production was an alien intrusion into the rural
landscape and consciousness of post-Civil War America .
As such, clearing for charcoal commanded special atten-
tion and comment and contributed, perhaps dispropor-
tionately, to the heightening awareness about the destruc-
tion of the forests during this critical period . Whatever
the truth of the situation, most people living in iron-pro-
ducing districts would have agreed with N. W. Lord's 1884
assessment of what was happening in the Hanging Rock
district of Ohio : "The disappearance of the forests under
the demands of the furnaces, which is now so apparen t
throughout the region, increases every year the difficulty
of obtaining the necessary fuel, and marks very plainly th e
fate of the charcoal iron industry.""
The Railroads
Of the many industries and activities that depended o n
the products of the forest, railroad construction and opera-
29. James M. Swank, "Iron and Steel Production, in Report on the
Manufacturers of the United States, vol. 2 of the Tenth Census of the
United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1883) . Note that the capacity of a
bushel varied between states. See Hough, Report Upon Forestry 3:62-63.
30. Lord, "Iron Manufacture ofOhio; p. 483.
tion had among the greatest impact on North America's
forest cover. Lumber was used for railroad ties, trestle
bridges, station buildings, telegraph poles, snow fences ,
and fuel, to mention but the main uses . But in addition to
this material impact, there was also a symbolic impact .
Some people deplored the railroad as an intruder in th e
pastoral scene, the harbinger of change and destruction -
in short, the "machine in the garden :'31 For others it was th e
technological culmination of the palaeotechnic age . It
caused urban commerce and industry to flourish, and eve n
seemed to promote the formation of the nation by linkin g
the continent together. As an early bulletin of the Forestry
Division pointed out in 1888, "the pioneering days are
rapidly disappearing before the energetic push and ad-
vancement of railroad building and settlements?' Earlier
on, in 1868, E . F. Palmer had given this symbolism a pic-
torial representation in his Currier and Ives picture entitle d
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, in which a
railroad crosses the scene and disappears into the distance ,
splitting the picture diagonally into two worlds, civilizatio n
and wilderness .32
There was little doubt that the railroad meant change ,
and in the context of the forest that could mean only
one thing-the diminution of the timber stand . In 1866
Andrew S. Fuller noted that "even where railroads hav e
penetrated regions abundantly supplied, we soon find all
along its track timber soon becomes scarce . For every rail-
road in the country requires a continued forest from one
end to the other of its lines to supply it with ties, fuel, an d
lumber for building cars :'33
Certainly during the 1860s, supplies of fuelwood near
railways in the Northeast had become scarce. In southern
New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio,
and also around Chicago, the demand of the urban popula -
tion for firewood, building timber, and charcoal, togethe r
with the high value of land in agricultural use, pushed th e
prices of railroad fuel upward to between seven and eight
dollars a cord. The New York Central Railroad ran irregu-
lar services during the winter of 1864 because of shortages
and problems caused by burning coal in wood-burning
locomotives, and then "energetic agents were sent back into
the country, and by offering high prices and making great
exertions to supply the road, in mid-winter the trains began
to resume their regularity?' Thomas Starr calculated that
the daily consumption of fuelwood by all railroads at that
time was 21,555 cords, which would have meant an annua l
drain on the forests of at least 6 .5 million cords, with a total
cash value two and one-half times that of the nation' s
annual coal production.34
Nevertheless, all the evidence suggests that wood-
burning locomotives began to consume less and less fue l
31. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the
Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) .
32. E . F. Palmer, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way
(1868), print for Currier and Ives.
33. Andrew S. Fuller, Forest Tree Culturist: A Treatise on the Culti-
vation of American Forest Trees (New York: Geo. and E. W. Woodward,
1866), p. 12.
34. Starr, "American Forests; p. 213.
throughout the 1870s and 1880s . In 1878 Franklin B.
Hough surveyed thirty-eight railroad companies operatin g
nearly eleven thousand miles of track, and only 254 out
of 2,424 locomotives, or a mere 10.5 percent, still burned
wood. Nearly half of those few wood burners operated o n
one line only, the Lake Shore, Michigan Southern Railwa y
(Buffalo to Chicago), but even this line used a mere 87,23 6
cords of wood compared to 261,719 tons of coal .3s
Although the demand for fuelwood was falling to almos t
insignificant levels, the amount of timber needed for rail-
way buildings, stations, telegraph poles, fencing, and par-
ticularly crossties, was high and growing proportionatel y
to the expansion in the length of track . Track length more
than doubled from thirty-two thousand miles in 1864 to
ninety thousand miles in 1875, and it nearly doubled agai n
during each of the next two decades .36
The resulting destruction of the forest was enormous
and widespread. Ohio, for example, by 1870 lay in the path
of many east-west railroads and had over six thousan d
miles of track, enclosed by over ten thousand miles of
wooden fencing, running on more than ten million ties ,
crossing over sixteen miles of wooden bridges and ten mile s
of trestles. Locomotives traveling Ohio track consumed
about 700,000 cords of fuelwood per year. The average
replacement rate for ties was between six and seven years ;
for bridges, five and one-half years ; and for trestles, seven
years.
The felling required to keep pace with this rate of con-
struction and even greater rate of decay and replacemen t
made it difficult, concluded Daniel Millikin, to "begin to
conceive the demands which this new invention will make
upon the woods." By 1876 the railroads were deemed to b e
making greater inroads than agriculture into the forests ,
"which were being removed entirely too rapidly?' The
whole balance of agriculture was being put in jeopardy by
"this denuding process:'37
By 1884 residents in Trumbull County in eastern Ohi o
noted that their "majestic forests" were "fast disappearing ,
to aid the rapid strides of public improvements?' In Belmon t
County, three new railroads had created "a special marke t
for lumber to be used for tunnels, ties, bridges, etc. :' which
caused considerable destruction . In Fairfield, "a vast
amount of lumber" had been used in railroad construction ;
in Tuscarawas, the "railroads have culled the forests . . . to
the extent that there is no first class or `heavily wooded
lands" left. In Muskingum, the construction of the new
35. Hough, Report Upon Forestry 1:112-15 .
36. For statistics on track mileage see U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1970,
part 2, pp. 727-32, tables Q284-312 and Q321-29 ; and E. E. Russell
Tratman, Railway Track and Track Work (New York: The Engineering
News Publishing Company, 1901), pp. 1-10 and table 2 in the appendix.
37. Daniel Milliken, "The Best Practical Means of Preserving and
Restoring the Forests of Ohio; in the Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the
Ohio State Board of Agriculture (Columbus: Nevins and Myers, State
Printers, 1871), pp. 319-33; and John H. Klippart, "The Condition of
Agriculture in Ohio in 1876; in the Thirty-first Annual Report of the Ohio
State Board of Agriculture (Columbus: Nevins and Myers, State Printers,
1877), pp. 486-538, especially p . 507.
INDUSTRIAL IMPACTS 117
Baltimore and Ohio line had unleashed "a mania for buyin g
woodland, stripping it of its timber, and then selling it fo r
agricultural purposes" Everywhere, the coming of the rail-
road meant felling .3 S
But consciousness of timber depletion finally became a
real sense of alarm on the largely treeless prairies, where the
land-grant railroads such as the Union Pacific, the Centra l
Pacific, the Burlington, and the Santa Fe, used enormou s
amounts of wood. Speedy construction (up to eight mile s
a day) in order to beat competitors and to provide a rapid
return on investment prompted the railroad companies to
use the quickest and cheapest solutions to their engineering
problems. Steel, earth, and stone were long-term and costly
components for bridges, banks, and tunnels ; moreover,
their use in construction required skilled labor. Wood, on
the other hand, was a familiar, well-tried, and relatively
low-cost material that could be improvised, fabricated, an d
adapted in numerous ways by unskilled labor. Wood could
be brought to the site of construction by established mean s
of transportation like rivers, or it could come behind the
railroads as they spread across the prairies .
I
n many areas the laying of the tracks passed almost un-
noticed, but the railroad did cut a swath through th e
forests in many areas of the country. When Charles Sargent
published his maps of forest depletion in 1884, showing
broad zones of clearing of at least five miles on either side
of any railroad, he helped to fix in many minds the simpl e
equation that the railroad equaled forest destruction . As
the decade wore on the railroad industry, like the charcoal
industry, assumed an emotional and symbolic importanc e
out of all proportion to its actual impact, great as the latte r
was in places.
Franklin Hough's 1878 inquiry helped to pinpoint how
much wood was being used . He noted that railroad lines
required between 2,200 and 3,500 ties per mile, the mos t
common number being 2,640. But the timber rotted an d
decayed as it lay embedded in ballast, so that the ties ha d
to be replaced about every five to six years, with between 1 5
and 20 percent of the track mileage requiring renewal every
year.39 Hough did not take his observations to their logical
conclusion and calculate the amount of forest cut as a result
of construction and maintenance, but in 1883 Nathaniel
Egleston's annual Forestry Division report estimated that
about 3 million acres must have been logged to supply ties
for existing track and that 472,400 acres were needed
annually (or 12.6 million acres in all) just to maintain the
railways. A few years later Egleston adjusted these figure s
to 567,714 acres annually and 17 million acres in all .4o
There the matter seemed to rest until the publication
in 1887 of the first technical and professional paper b y
the new Forestry Division on "The Relation of Railroads
to Forest Supplies and Forestry." This bulletin thrust th e
railroad-tie issue into the forefront of the forest-depletio n
debate that was gaining momentum during the closing
years of the century. M. G. Kern of St. Louis, agent for th e
division and author of the bulletin, posed the question i n
blunt and uncompromising terms :
Considering the stupendous amounts of timber already
withdrawn from native forests, the annual demands o f
railways now in operation, and the increase in mileage from
year to year, it becomes necessary to take a more accurate
survey of the fields of demand and supply, unbiased by th e
popular delusion of the inexhaustible forest wealth o f
America. The necessity is no longer either to be ignored o r
lightly treated as in the past ."41
Kern calculated that existing tracks and poles consume d
3.1 billion cubic feet and that maintenance and new con-
struction consumed another 0.5 billion cubic feet annually.
When due allowance was made for types of timber neede d
(poles or dimensional timber), and for the density and yield
of the forest, the annual drain was nearly 300,000 acres -
249,214 acres for the maintenance of tracks and poles, and
47,673 acres for the construction of new track . Kern's figure
for the annual cut was less than Egleston's sheer guess a
few years earlier, but was no less startling for that . Further-
more, Kern's figure was calculated in a reasonable, precise,
and conservative manner, which lent it an authenticity an d
stature that Egleston's estimates never had.
Whatever the precise figures, the concern over the impact
of the railroad industry on the forests was genuine and
great. The concern was heightened by the manner of cut-
ting. The railroad owners preferred white oak, and to a
lesser extent, other hardwoods like chestnut oak and black
locust, which had the requisite strength, elasticity, an d
resistance to rotting (figure 7). They were convinced that
the ties lasted longer if they were taken from young second-
growth timber, if they were hewn rather than cut, if th e
outer sapwood was discarded and only the inner heart -
wood used, and if they were felled in the winter rather than
the spring or summer. The result was the total destruction
of substantial stands. As one lumber journal put it: "There
is no branch of the lumber industry where there is mor e
waste of raw material. . . . Each tie is split from clea r
wood, and it takes about 35 feet of clear lumber to make
a merchantable tie. . . . When to this is added the percen-
tage of `culls' that are arbitrarily rejected by the inspector s
on behalf of the railroads at the [timber] owner's expense ,
it will be found that each tie represents about 75 fee t
38. Proceedings of the Ohio State Forestry Association Meeting,
1884, pp. 138, 153, 166, 96, and 101 respectively.
39. Hough, Report Upon Forestry 1:115-16.
40. See the U.S. Department ofAgriculture'sAnnual Report for 1883 ,
p. 445, and itsAnnual Report for 1885 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1886), p.
185. Bernhard E. Fernow estimated that between ten and fifteen millio n
acres of forest were needed to feed the railroads; see his Consumption of
Forest Supplies by Railroads and Practicable Economy in Their Use, U.S.
118 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY / JULY 1987
Department of Agriculture Forestry Division Bulletin 4 (Washington,
D.C.: GPO, 1890), pp. 13-14. Other estimates are contained in Franklin B.
Hough, "Report on Kinds and Quantities of Timber Used in Railroad
Ties; in Nathaniel H. Egleston, ed., Report Upon Forestry (Washington,
D.C.: GPO, 1884), 4:119-73.
41. M. G. Kern, The Relation of Railroads to Forest Supplies and
Forestry, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forestry Division Bulletin 1
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), p . 14.
Figure Z The range of oaks, the hardwood-tie market (1882), and railroad plantation s
(based on Olson, The Timber Depletion Myth, pp. 15, 18, 81) .
Railroad plantations 0 300 mis
111t1 Limit of Chestnu t
· Before 1900 (used since 1890 )
n Catalpa . 1900-1920 O 300 k m
0
O
Black locust, 1900-192 0
Other
of good merchantable lumber in the standing timber de-
stroyed for it :'42
This wasteful exploitation had little scientific basis. A
spring or summer felling did not hasten decay because o f
sap in the outer wood, though a winter felling was inciden-
tally advantageous because the wood had stood for several
months when fungi growth was minimal, and the woo d
was seasoned to a certain extent. Market forces did not
check the exploitation, as might be expected . Farmers any-
where near stands of the favored species either cut trees o n
their own land during their winter off-months or worked
for the railroads. Selling ties made an important contribu-
tion to farm capital and purchasing power in the least-
developed parts of the country. The farmers cut readily an d
abundantly, oversupplying the railroad companies, wh o
controlled the quantity, quality, and price paid by merely
adjusting the freight rate, which effectively lowered the
prices of ties. In addition, the ever-increasing spread an d
integration of long-distance and branch lines throughou t
the 1870s and 1880s tapped new sources of timber so tha t
the railroads, as consumer, never felt the pinch of higher
prices, the specter of scarcity, or the need to economize by
using substitute materials . The railroads created and sup-
plied a massive demand with no change in price .
The result was that an immense quantity of tie timbe r
was cut down and delivered to the railroads at prices wel l
below those the same wood would have fetched in eastern
or urban markets. "When one locality is exhausted;' wrote
42. Quoted by Kern, The Relation of Railroads to Forest Supplies, pp .
15-16.
Kern, "the scene of slaughter of the valuable young timber
is simply shifted to another."43
The preference for oak and other hardwoods meant tha t
areas that had, on the whole, escaped the worst ravages
of commercial lumbering, such as the Appalachians, th e
Ozarks, southern Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and
Indiana, now became major sources of ties. The tributaries
of the Ohio flowing off the Appalachians, such as the
Tennessee, Cumberland, Green, Kentucky, Licking, and
Kanawa, were main lines of production and movement. In
Missouri, the oaks of the Ozark plateau fed the railroad
network that radiated out from St . Louis in all directions,
and indeed, St. Louis became the main crosstie market in
the country- at about the time of World War I. Although
well over 60 percent of the ties were oak and another 5
percent chestnut, the shortfall had to come from other
species elsewhere in the country, and the price of oak and
chestnut ties was correspondingly high (figure 7) . For
example, hemlock and tamarack came from the norther n
areas around the Lake States (3 .4 percent), together with
red and white cedar (6 .8 percent), all of which flowed south
through the major lumber market of Chicago to be dis-
tributed across the prairies.
Individual Chicago merchants such as Edward Ayer,
who controlled two-fifths of the Chicago cedar-tie market,
could fill individual orders ranging from 1 to 2.6 million
ties for companies like the Burlington and the Santa Fe . For
43. Sherry H. Olson, The Depletion Myth : A History of Railroad Us e
of Timber (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971),
pp. 28ff; and Kern, The Relation of Railroads to Forest Supplies, pp.
19-20.
INDUSTRIAL IMPACTS 119
the first time the eastern slopes of the Rockies became
a major source of commercial timber as crossties were
floated down the east-flowing rivers to meet the line s
advancing westward across the prairies .44
For the railroad companies the supply of timber neve r
seemed in doubt throughout the 1880s and 1890s. But the
government foresters and the conservation publicist s
thought otherwise : from Fuller to Hough, and through the
succession of personalities such as Egleston, Kern, an d
particularly Bernhard E. Fernow, the crosstie industry wa s
a central focus in concerns about timber depletion. The
railroads were identified as a major cause of the depletio n
because they had spread into all regions of the country, an d
moreover their effects on the forests could be calculate d
precisely from the length of the line and the rate of replace-
ment. In addition, the railroad was a popular target for two
kinds of social critics: those who did not like "big business"
and those who feared the railroads' disruptive social effect s
on the countryside .
Bernhard Fernow, who became chief of the Forestr y
Division after Egleston in 1886, saw the railroad tie ques-
tion as a new and positive means of promoting forestr y
interests and the fortunes of his fledgling division . In addi-
tion, the issue fitted well into his strategy of reversing fores t
depletion by convincing large users to use timber rationally
and economically. Nearly every annual report of the divi-
sion under Fernow drew attention to the impending dearth
of supplies and the railroads' contribution to that crisis.45
Kern also argued that the "reckless system of forest
clearing" for ties could not go on indefinitely ; the forest
supplies would run out. He suggested two remedies: the
preservation of timber to prevent rotting, and the plantin g
of new trees to make good the deficiencies .
The impregnation of wood with chemicals had mad e
little headway in the United States, although zinc chlorid e
and creosote had been used in Europe since the beginnin g
of the century. The cost of creosoting was high, and though
it had a good effect in maritime conditions, its efficacy had
not been proven for ties . One problem with treatment of
all kinds was the mistaken idea that fungal growth was a
symptom rather than a cause of decay and therefore tha t
treating the outside of a tie could arrest or prevent decay
even if fungal growth had already taken hold in the heart of
the unseasoned wood. Creosoting worked, as did most
impregnating methods, only under intense pressure, and
was so expensive that a treated softwood tie of hemlock or
cedar might ultimately cost as much as an untreated oak ti e
but last no longer. Consequently, although information on
treatment was available from about 1885 onward, few rail-
roads attempted to preserve their ties . Instead rapid rate s
of replacement continued throughout the 1890s, and th e
44. Olson, The Depletion Myth, p. 25; Fernow, Consumption of
Forest Supplies, p. 14; and William H. Wroten, "The Railroad Tie Indus -
try in the Central Rocky Mountain Region, 1867-1900; (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Colorado, 1956).
45. Andrew Denny Rodgers, Bernhard Eduard Fernow: A Story of
North American Forestry (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1951), p.
109; and Fernow, Consumption of Forest Supplies, p. 14.
120 JOURNAL OF FOREST HISTORY / JULY 1987
railroad companies economized by using better purchasing
procedures, better stockkeeping of supplies, mergers, and
consolidations.
A few railroads did preserve their ties . The Santa Fe
established a treatment works at Las Vegas, New Mexico ,
and the Union Pacific at Omaha, Nebraska, as early as
1881, but these were isolated instances. Preservation plants
made little headway until the price of timber rose as sup-
plies dwindled after 1900 . Then the ten plants in the
country increased rapidly to 70 in the space of a few year s
and reached 102 at the outbreak of World War I. During
and after the war a very substantial proportion of ties
of all kinds were treated as methods became more reli-
able and costs of treatment declined both absolutely and
relatively.46
K
ern's second solution, planting trees, was far less effec-
tive than chemical preservatives in combating railroa d
timber depletion, but was far more attractive and eye -
catching. Tree planting was an emotional issue that ha d
already captured the imagination of the settler on the plains
west of the ninety-sixth meridian . Arbor Day was pro -
claimed in 1872, the Timber Culture Act went throug h
Congress a year later, and the rain-making debate was still
in full swing during the late 1880s and early 1890s, at the
very time the railways were beginning to fire up the timber
depletion debate. Andrew Fuller had proposed forest plan -
tations back in 1866 when he pointed out "how simple it
would be for the railroad companies to have a few acres of
forest trees every few miles all along and contiguous to the
line:' By 1872 the Burlington and Missouri River Railroa d
had invested moderately in plantations, as had the St. Paul
and Pacific in southern Minnesota - not for timber, it must
be stressed, but for snow fences and windbreaks, and as a
part of their programs to encourage settlement and expan d
traffic along their lines.47
Perhaps the first serious experiment to grow trees for
timber was by H. H. Hunnewell, in 1877 at Farlington i n
Crawford County, Kansas. Hunnewell, who was presiden t
of the Kansas City, Fort Scott, and Gulf Railway, plante d
about 640 acres of catalpa, which did well and was firs t
thinned out in 1894-95 . This, and many similar small proj-
ects, attracted enormous attention. Indeed, the Forestry
Division bulletins and the general literature on arboricul-
ture give the impression that these insignificant experi-
ments were the main and even the only concern of forestr y
during these decades. The American Forestry Congres s
held in Cincinnati and Montreal in 1882 heard papers on
catalpa and locust by eminent figures like Hough . The
reports were glowing : "These stately blocks of young and
thrifty trees, sprung up as if by magic on a treeless plain"
was typical prose. Public pressure, combined with price
rises for ties between 1895 and 1907 and Forest Servic e
46. Hough, Report Upon Forestry 1:116-17; Kern, Relations of Rail-
roads to Forest Supplies, p. 20; Olson, The Depletion Myth, pp. 57,
63-68, 104-9.
47. Fuller, Forest Tree Culturist, p. 12; and Richard C . Overton, Bur-
lington West: A Colonization History, pp. 103-105.
predictions for further price increases, caused some com-
panies to plant trees along their tracks .48
Yet the plantations were few and insignificant-only
about four dozen locations and at most fifteen thousand
acres were affected over thirty years . If the trees had all
come to maturity and been good merchantable timber,
they would have supplied ties for less than ten days at th e
1910 rate of consumption (figure 7) . The enthusiasm over
catalpa, black locust, cottonwood, willow, and eucalyp t
was largely optimistic. The plantations did not make the
money their promoters had forecast and many were located
outside the natural limits for the species planted . However
justified the plantations were as snow fences, windbreaks ,
or aesthetic settings for stations, they came nowhere near t o
filling the timber needs of the railways. By 1915 or there-
abouts, the experiment in planting was largely over .49
The debate over timber depletion due to the railroad s
had one other immediate effect . Bernhard Fernow pro-
moted timber savings not only through planting and pres-
ervation, but also through substitution and timber science .
The first merely promoted the use of steel, stone, and live
hedges where wood had been used before.
Timber science offered more complex remedies . Fernow
believed that bridges and ties could require 20 to 25 percent
less wood if the proper kind of timber was used . Railroads
were becoming efficiency-conscious and had access to dis -
tant supplies. Fernow reasoned that they could, therefore ,
select the best timber for the job, unlike farmers who
relied on their own woodlots for building materials an d
fuel. Under Fernow's direction thousands of tests were
carried out on the strength and durability of timbers, on
air seasoning, on tie preservation, and on every aspect of
timber physics. Fernow's tests proved that the formerly
despised chestnut oak was perfectly interchangeable wit h
the favored white oak as a tie timber, and that southern
pines were all of very similar quality and equalled northern
white pine as a bridge timber. Both findings appealed to
economy-conscious railroads. Though Fernow's experi-
ments were stopped in 1896 when Congress diverted fund s
away from material research to tree planting and fores t
management, the important test centers that arose ou t
of his program became in 1910 the nucleus of the Forest
Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin .so
What, then, was the impact of the railroads on the fores t
resources of the country? Kern's figure of nearly 300,000
acres of forest cut over every year was, to a certain extent,
48. Kern, The Relation of Railroads to Forest Supplies, p. 24; Hough,
"Tree Planting by Railroads; in Hough, Report Upon Forestry 1:118-22 ;
and William L . Hall and Herman von Schrenk, The Hardy Catalpa, U.S.
Department of Agriculture Forest Service Bulletin 37 (Washington, D.C.:
GPO, 1902).
49. Olson, The Depletion Myth, pp. 93-95.
50. Fernow, Consumption of Forest Supplies, pp. 15-16; Fernow,
Report Upon the Forestry Investigations of the United States Departmen t
of Agriculture, 1877-1898 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1899), p. 22; Rod-
gers, Bernhard Eduard Fernow, pp. 174-83,187-91, 239-40. See also E.
E. Russell Tratman's Report on Substitution of Metal for Wood in Rail-
road Ties, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forestry Division Bulletin 4
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1890); Charles A. Nelson, A History of the U.S.
Forest Products Laboratory (1910-1963) (Madison, Wisconsin : Forest
Products Laboratory, 1971), pp. 25-33.
lost sight of in the tangled debates and conflicting claim s
for preservation, planting, substitution, and scientific test -
ing, none of which could significantly diminish the overall
impact of the railroad on the forest. In general terms, Kern's
calculations corresponded with the 1911 estimates of the
Forest Service, which calculated that with an annual
average renewal rate of 350 ties per mile of track, and an
average cut of 200 ties per forested acre, some 290,00 0
acres of woods were consumed in 1880 and 445,000 acre s
in 1890 (table 3).
Table 3. Estimates of Railroad Ties Use d
and Acres of Forest Cleared, 1870-191 0
Miles of
track
Millions
of ties
renewed
annually
Millions
of ties used
on new
construction
Total
millions
of ties
annually
Thousands
of acres
of forest
cleared
1870 60,000 21 18 39 195
1880 107,000 37 21 58 290
1890 200,000 70 19 89 445
1900 259,000 9 1
1910 357,000 124 124 620
From Olson, The Depletion Myth, p. 12.
As Sherry Olson has pointed out in her penetrating stud y
of the railroad-tie industry, figures of nearly half a million
acres cut annually by the turn of the century must be
augmented to take into account wood used for the con-
struction and replacement of buildings, rolling stock, an d
bridges. Olson does not point out, however, that the mile-
age of urban electric railways also increased from 189 0
onward and added about another thirty thousand miles of
track by 1910.51 The railroads were using one-fourth to one -
fifth of the nation's annual timber production during the
latter part of the nineteenth century, and the view that th e
railroad was "the insatiable Juggernaut of the vegetable
world;' while a little exaggerated, was essentially correct.52
E
ach of the impacts on the forest examined here de-
clined with time. First coal, then electricity and gas
were substituted for firewood in heating homes ; charcoal
gave way to coke for smelting iron; fuelwood was replaced
by coal on the steam locomotives. Although nothing has
really been a successful subtitute for wooden ties, the
number needed has declined as railroads have decreased
the miles of track maintained. None of these uses have
important impacts on the forest now, but from our con-
temporary viewpoint it is all too easy to forget that the
abundance and widespread availability of wood were prob-
ably mainsprings of the country's industrialization during
the second half of the nineteenth century. Without its wood
America would not be the country it is today.

A
51. Olson, The Depletion Myth, pp . 12-13; and U.S. Bureau of the
Census, Historical Statistics, part 2, p. 727.
52. Olson, The Depletion Myth, p. 14, quoting Howard Miller in The
Forester 3 (January 1897), p. 6.
INDUSTRIAL IMPACTS 121