II. The Roots of the Logging and Lumbering Era

1800s

When Euro-Americans began to settle Minnesota in the early 1820s, they found about 19.5 million acres in natural prairie systems and about 31.5 million in forests. Fewer than 200 years later, only about 0.3 percent of the natural prairie remains. And forests have shrunk to fewer than 18 million acres. The vast pine stands have been harvested and replaced with aspen and birch hardwoods.Climatic shifts that changed boreal forests to prairies and back again were macro changes in the forests. The changes brought on by modern Minnesotans may be just as drastic.

1830s

Lumbermen entered Minnesota (then part of Wisconsin Territory) along the St. Croix River and to harvest pines along the river banks. The tree of choice was the white pine.

1839

A group of New England businessmen headed by Orange Walker and L.S. Judd started the Marine Lumber Company, the first sawmill in Minnesota, along the St. Croix, and soon a community, Marine on St. Croix, formed around the mill.

1840

A second commercial mill was erected at Stillwater and Minnesota's lumbering boom had begun.

1860s

The saw-milling center moved from the St. Croix River to the new city of Minneapolis at St. Anthony Falls, using the vast white pine forests of the Mississippi River Valley.

1870s

Steam power was introduced into saw milling, replacing the need for water power and allowing saw mills to move away from St. Anthony Falls to other Mississippi River towns. Steam power and new, faster circular saws enabled logging camps to increase production.

1880s

With increased commercial railroad building in the state, larger sawmill steam engines and the invention of the band saw (a belt of steel that worked faster and left less wood waste), sawmills increased in size and expanded around the state. Brainerd, Little Falls, Crookston, Cloquet, Duluth, and International Falls became saw-milling towns.

1890s to 1910

The golden era of lumbering in Minnesota. Logging railroads reached deep into the woods as steam power became the mover of logs. Over 20,000 lumberjacks and half that number of draft horses were working in the northern pineries of the state. An equal number of men worked in the state's sawmills and another 20,000 people worked in related wood-production factories. Yet, dark clouds emerged on the lumbering skyline; catastrophic forest fires fueled by logging operations leaving dry tree tops called "slash" swept the landscape and devastated many northern communities-Hinckley in 1894, Chisholm in 1908, Baudette in 1910 and Cloquet-Moose Lake in 1918.

1900

The peak year of white pine logging with over 2.3 billion board feet of lumber, about 4.7 million cords, cut from the state's forests. From that year alone, Minnesota pine could build over 600,000 two-story homes or a boardwalk nine feet wide encircling the earth at the equator. In each of the next 10 years, nearly equal cuts of pines were made in the state.