This is a guest column by Jay Schalin, senior fellow at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Born in Pennsylvania, he responded to my request for “state stories.”
The uplands of northern Pennsylvania were a wild and wooly place in the early years of our nation. Rough men carved out large fortunes—or eked out bare livings—by extracting its natural resources, with violence occasionally erupting from their endeavors. Sometimes, the triggers for violence were the treatment of workers, as occurred in the eastern coal fields, pitting the pro-union Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society, against coal baron Franklin Gowen and his Pinkerton Detective Agency allies (the theme of a 1970 movie starring Sean Connery).
Another case of industrial violence resulted from a clash between competing technologies. It featured small independent entrepreneurs attacking the purveyors of more efficient, larger-scale methods. This is somewhat reminiscent of the violence wrought by English textile workers known as “Luddites” against more efficient factories in the early 19th century.
Vast stands of tall trees cover northern Pennsylvania. Lumber, used for everything from shipbuilding to furniture-making, was a valuable commodity in the 1800s. Two large rivers—the Delaware and the Susquehanna—allowed the transport of logs to Philadelphia and Baltimore, as well as to smaller mill towns along the way.
Initially, logging in the region was a small-scale operation, often done by farmers in the off-season. They dragged felled logs in the abundant snow to the rivers or their major tributaries, lashed them together to form rafts, and rode them to market or to transshipment centers. [1]
One estimate of the number of small-scale “farmer-raftsmen” operating on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River was 30,000. [2]
New Technology in Transporting Logs
But in 1836, a new method of getting logs to towns that was successful in Maine appeared on the Susquehanna. So-called “log drivers” would send logs downstream not as rafts but floating freely. [3] At some point, the progress of the logs would be stopped by a “boom,” a series of stone pillars connected by large timbers, which blocked the river and collected the logs.
Sometimes the logs were processed into lumber at the site of the boom, as at Williamsport (which became known as the “Lumber Capital of the World”). Elsewhere, where conditions permitted, the entire boom was guided downriver by barges.[4]
Clashes began to occur between raftsmen and drivers. Drivers treated raftsmen with contempt; according to the Clearfield Review, they stole logs waiting on the river banks to be turned into rafts.[5] Furthermore, the free-floating logs endangered rafts in the fast-flowing water, and the large booms also impeded the progress of the rafts downriver. Raftsmen responded by such hostile tactics as driving spikes into the logs of drivers—possibly causing serious injury to sawmill workers.
Raftsmen tried political measures to ban log drives. In 1852, a bill to do so “failed by a single vote” in the Pennsylvania Senate. [6]
Raftsmen Respond to the Log Drivers
In April of 1857, the raftsmen took matters into their own hands. They set upon some logger-drivers on Clearfield Creek with “clubs, axes, and firearms.” The drivers were driven away (with no fatalities) and the raftsmen destroyed their equipment. Forty-seven raftsmen and their supporters were charged with rioting. However, most charges were dropped and “no jail sentences were imposed” for the remainder. [7]
Smaller conflagrations continued for years, but nothing as serious as the one in 1857 [8]. Eventually, “innovation” defeated “tradition”: market demand for lower lumber prices favored the more efficient, large-scale log-driving over rafting, although a small number of raftsmen were able to remain in business for a time by specializing in taking very long timbers needed for shipbuilding and bridge-building far downstream. [9]
The picture above shows logs caught by a log boom in a river drive (this one in Minnesota). Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Other articles by Jay Schalin can be found here and here.
Notes (Comments follow the notes).
[1] Thomas R. Cox, “Transition in the Woods: Log Drivers, Raftsmen, and the Emergence of Modern Lumbering in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 104, no. 3 (July 1980), 347.
[2] Cox, 348.
[3] “River Log Drive,” Forest History Society, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJDD9VCSfpY.
[4] Cox, 349.
[5] Cox, 352.
[6] Cox, 353.
[7]Cox, 358.
[8]Cox, 360.
[9] Cox, 362.
Read the original article at janetakesonhistory.org
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