The Great Cordwood Opportunity
In 1877, a local editor saw a path to economic prosperity by shipping the dense forests of the Puget Sound to a treeless San Francisco.
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 last published annual report of the U.S. Commissioner of Agriculture gives the average yield of the fir forests of Puget Sound as 100 to 500 cords per acre. Washington Territory evidently leads all States and Territories in the Union in the amount of its timber product—ten to one on the average. Considering that California is almost a treeless country, the question arises whether Puget Sound, by a little pains, may not obtain the trade of furnishing San Francisco with a large part of her fuel. Our trade in lumber, shingles, laths, piles, spars, poles, bolts, and hard-wood timber is rapidly growing. Could we not increase the income by including cord-wood? The cutting of the wood here costs only about $1.00 per cord, and owner’s stumpage is only 25 cents. In San Francisco, it brings $8 to $12 per cord, which leaves a very fair margin. Probably the most practicable way would be to employ a small class of vessels, chartered for this particular trade. In this way, employment might be given to large numbers of men in the immediate neighborhood of this city, and no harm done to the country. The clearing up would leave the land much more nearly in condition for permanent use in orchards and fields than it is after the culling process of logging.
“The clearing up incident to removing all the cord wood, would leave the land much more nearly in condition for permanent use in orchards and fields.”
This editorial reflects the era's relentless drive to commodify the Pacific Northwest's natural resources, a precursor to the massive logging industries that defined the region. Just as 19th-century editors sought to turn stumps into profit for San Francisco, today’s Seattle grapples with how to reconcile its explosive growth and land use with the long-term ecological consequences of that extraction.
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