The Mill Owners Set the Price: A Quiet Hotel Meeting to Fix Lumber Rates for the Season
Owners of the Port Gamble, Tacoma and Port Blakely mills met at the Rainier-Grand to agree on a price for lumber — just as orders pour in and California discovers native fir is as good as oak.
E. G. Ames and Fred Drew, of the Port Gamble lumber mills; Charles Hanson and William Hanson, of the Tacoma mills; and J. A. Campbell, of the Port Blakely mills, held a conference Tuesday afternoon at the Rainier-Grand hotel and, it is understood, determined on a price for lumber for the coming season. Business is looking up in all sections and orders are coming in very rapidly, but prices have been down to a very low notch.
The California market is using a large quantity of native fir for building purposes, as it has been recently discovered that treating and finishing it makes building material equal, if not superior, to oak in all grades. Native lumber is in brisk demand.
“Business is looking up in all sections and orders are coming in very rapidly, but prices have been down to a very low notch.”
A handful of men in a hotel parlor settling the price of lumber for an entire region is the timber economy in miniature — cooperative on its face, collusive underneath. The same questions of who sets prices for a resource the whole region depends on still shadow the Pacific Northwest's timber and resource industries today.
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