The Lumberman's Frontier


Book Description

With The Lumberman's Frontier, Thomas Cox has reconstructed a groundbreaking history that stands apart from all previous studies of American forests. Forests were ubiquitous in early America, but it was only in selected areas that trees, rather than farming, attracted settlement. These areas constitute the lumberman's frontier, which appeared first in northern New England in the seventeenth century, followed by upstate New York, the Allegheny Plateau, the upper Great Lakes states, the Gulf South, and the Far West. The forest frontiers generated capital and building materials important in the nation's development, but they also left a legacy of environmental problems, class and urban-rural divisions, and economic frictions. The 1930s marked the end of the lumberman's frontier, but these consequences continue to shape attitudes and policies toward forests, most notably the questions "Whose forests are they?" and "How and by whom should forests be used?" Drawing upon recent work in social and economic history, as well as a wealth of historical data on forest industries and individuals, The Lumberman's Frontier neither glorifies economic development nor falls into the maw of gloom-and-doom. It puts individual actors at center stage, allowing the points of view of the workers and lumbermen to emerge. The Lumberman's Frontier will appeal to students and scholars of forestry, public policy, and environmental history, as well as to general readers interested in the history and settlement of the United States.




Michigan's Lumbertowns


Book Description

Michigan's foremost lumbertowns, flourishing urban industrial centers in the late 19th century, faced economic calamity with the depletion of timber supplies by the end of the century. Turning to their own resources and reflecting individual cultural identities, Saginaw, Bay City, and Muskegon developed dissimilar strategies to sustain their urban industrial status. This study is a comprehensive history of these lumbertowns from their inception as frontier settlements to their emergence as reshaped industrial centers. Primarily an examination of the role of the entrepreneur in urban economic development, Michigan Lumbertowns considers the extent to which the entrepreneurial approach was influenced by each city's cultural-ethnic construct and its social history. More than a narrative history, it is a study of violence, business, and social change.







American Lumberman


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The Southern Lumberman


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Journal of Proceedings


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Most vols. have appendices consisting of reports of various State offices.




Nationalism, Capitalism, and Colonization in Nineteenth-Century Quebec


Book Description

The settlements, economically based on lumber alone, were locked into poverty and dependency by Anglophone-monopoly control of the spruce forests. J.I. Little examines the ultimate failure of the British and Quebec settlement projects and argues that the stranglehold of the monopolies was broken only by the belated extension of the rail network into the Upper St Francis district. Canadians have only recently begun to question their model of company-leased Crown forest reserves and to become interested in the more efficient Scandinavian model of small-scale, privately owned woodlots. This book is one of the first to explore the ideological contradictions and social costs which followed from the entrenchment of large-scale lumber companies in a settled zone.