Virginia and Rainy Lake Company

The Virginia and Rainy Lake Company (V&RL) incorporated in 1905 and consisted of three subsidiaries: the Virginia Lumber Company; the Duluth, Virginia, and Rainy Lake Railway; and the Minnesota Land and Construction Company. In 1908, investment from lumber magnates Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser and Edward Hines transformed the V&RL into the world’s largest white pine lumber company overnight. In 1929, however, twenty-one years of mounting costs and decreasing yields forced the company to close.

Logging operations began extending into northern Minnesota during the 1880s and 1890s, leaving devastated landscapes and forest fires in their wake. In 1901, two Minnesota lumbermen, William O’Brien and Wirt H. Cook, organized the Duluth, Virginia, and Rainy Lake Railway (DV&RL) to transport logs from their remote operations to sawmills and distribution centers. The DV&RL, along with the Virginia Lumber Company and the Minnesota Land and Construction Company, became subsidiaries of the O’Brien-and-Cook-owned Virginia & Rainy Lake Company, which incorporated in 1905.

In November 1908, the V&RL offloaded the DV&RL to a holding company before merging with lumber magnates Edward Hines and Frederick Weyerhaeuser. The merger made it the largest lumber concern in the world, with control over most of the standing pine in the northern US and markets in Chicago, Buffalo, Duluth, and Minneapolis. Commanding these American markets while funneling lumber into the growing Canadian West made the V&RL a transnational supplier of pine lumber.

Once amalgamated, V&RL controlled nearly three billion board feet of timberlands; valued at the common rate of $6 per thousand board feet, they gave the company a total valuation of around $20 million. The new board of the V&RL elected Hines (both a prominent lumber-industry figure and the company’s largest single shareholder), to assume the role of company president. 

In line with forestry protocols of the day, Hines pursued a policy of clearcutting. Like other companies, the V&RL stripped entire forests from the landscape in the name of fire prevention and agricultural development. Superintendent of Logging Frank H. Gillmor reported in 1919 that he had received instructions “to practically clean the ground of all timber that would make anything in the shape of lumber.” As the 1920s wore on and company profits dwindled, Hines reiterated clear-cutting efforts—not for the sake of conservation, but to log the timber, mill it into lumber, and “convert it into money as rapidly as possible.” 

The IWW strikes in 1916 and 1917 devastated the V&RL, with some logging camps losing more than 90 percent of their workforce. But the strikes were only the beginning of the V&RL’s labor problem. A labor shortage, which Hines and Gillmor attributed to state and county road construction, plagued the company throughout the 1920s. In 1915, the average daily wage per man on the V&RL payroll was $4.94; wages rose considerably after the strikes, never falling below $11.72 after 1920. 

By 1928, the V&RL logged more than 30,000 acres for only the second time since 1915, but with a significantly diminished yield per acre. Whereas 32,000 acres yielded over 130 million board feet in 1915, by 1928 the 30,000 acres yielded only 84 million board feet. The company needed to log more acreage simply to stay afloat with decreasing yields and increasing costs. 

Only a corporation as heavily financed as the V&RL could have logged Minnesota’s remnant pine forests, but by the late-1920s the high costs associated with transporting men, supplies, and logs increasing distances became too high even for them. The evolution of the nation’s logging industry, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, flooded the market with lumber that drove down prices, making the high costs of accessing Minnesota’s remnant white pine increasingly prohibitive. 

No longer able to justify increasing costs and diminishing yields, the V&RL closed after the 1929 season. At its height, the company’s flagship sawmill at Virginia had occupied one square mile, with seven band saws running nonstop. During its tenure, the V&RL had manufactured roughly 2.5 billion feet of lumber through capital expenses exceeding $30 million. 

A few years later, in 1937, the International Logging Company completed Minnesota’s last log drive, closing a critical chapter in state, regional, and national history. The logging industry had grown the state’s economy since before statehood, and produced irreversible effects on Ojibwe and Dakota peoples and their homelands.