The Secret Syndicate Attempting to Control the Pacific Timber Trade
A covert effort by lumber barons to establish a monopoly by paying smaller mills to shut down.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Tacoma Lumberman for this week contains an article on the big pool that is being worked up among the lumbermen on the Coast. The plan as outlined in a letter from a large lumber dealer of San Francisco is to include every company shipping by water from Lower California to Alaska, all the small mills to be subsidized and shut down. These small mills, numbering something over 100, will receive from $400 to $1,000 per year, according to the figure they cut in water shipping, to keep their hands off. It will cost the 'combine' between $40,000 and $100,000 per year for subsidies alone. As the combined shipments of lumber monthly from the Pacific coast are worth over $1,200,000, and include fir, spruce and cedar from Washington and British Columbia, sugar pine, yellow pine and fir from Oregon, and redwood and pine from California, it may be imagined that the 'combine' is a big one. John B. Denny, secretary of the Western Mill Company of Seattle, confirmed that such a project was on foot, but the arrangements had not been consummated yet.
“If the 'combine' is formed there is no doubt but that it will be in position to fix prices to suit itself, and it will have no competition.”
This 1892 effort to centralize control of the Pacific Northwest’s primary natural resource mirrors modern corporate consolidation within the regional real estate and tech markets. It highlights the recurring struggle between smaller independent operators and dominant industrial interests to dictate the price and flow of goods.
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