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Although the industry has been in decline over the long term, it trended upward for a short period during a national housing boom between and It increased rapidly in the early s, going fromboard feet per worker in to 1. Although there are many well-paying career kregon in the sector that can be pursued straight out of high school, lumber products oregon research advances in wood products manufacturing, forest management and digital forest mapping often require specialized training and education that typically earns workers higher wages. Tower Sawmill, Keno, Oregon, c. Written by William Lumber products oregon research.

Although Williamson also was found guilty, his conviction was overturned on appeal. The completion of transcontinental railroads to the Northwest in the s extended logging and lumbering to less accessible areas, especially eastern Oregon.

Bend quickly became a pacesetter for ponderosa pine production when two Great Lakes firms, Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon, opened modern sawmills on opposite sides of the Deschutes River in In the Rogue River Valley, Medford -based Owen-Oregon Company built logging railroads to places such as Butte Falls , where a huge volume of pine lumber was turned out during the s.

Its successor, the Medford Corporation, became a vertically integrated firm in the postwar era, providing jobs and steady paychecks through the s. Northwest loggers confronted physical obstacles unknown to woodsmen who emigrated from the Great Lakes states. The size of the trees— Douglas-fir as tall as three hundred feet and ten feet in diameter—posed problems made more difficult by the rugged terrain.

In Douglas-fir country, from the crest of the Cascades to the Pacific, loggers at first felled trees into waterways, where they could be floated to mills. They soon constructed corduroy roadways into timber, using teams of oxen to haul logs along skid roads to water. Loggers first used single-bitted axes to fell trees. By the s, however, they were using double-bitted axes and two-man crosscut saws, a technology that remained in place until the development of gasoline-powered chainsaws in the s.

Steam power came to the woods in the s with the invention of the steam donkey , which used steam to power a capstan that pulled logs along the ground with a wire rope. In the first decade of the twentieth century, loggers added an aerial twist to steam-donkey logging, the high lead, allowing operators to haul logs with one end suspended in the air free from stumps and brush. The development of the high lead accelerated yarding logs and increased the incident of death and injury to logging crews.

The development of heavy-duty log trucks during the s gradually displaced most logging railroads by , and steam donkeys gave way to gasoline and diesel-powered yarding machines during and after World War II. The most revolutionary tool by far was the powerful one-man chainsaw, which replaced two-person timber fallers and their crosscut saws. Oregon mills had adopted steam power in the s, which had greatly increased productivity.

Another boost to production occurred during the s, when mill owners around Coos Bay and on the lower Willamette River replaced circular saws with band saws. By the s and into the twentieth century, electric-powered sawmills began appearing in major centers of production. Timber communities in Oregon operated in an economic environment that prospered and suffered with the price of lumber.

Timber harvesting grew apace during the early s, with loggers east and west of the Cascade Range pushing farther away from waterways in their quest for timber.

Troubles began to emerge in when construction slowed in California, prompting slowdowns in the mills and layoffs in logging camps. Those market conditions were precursors to the collapse of primary products markets during the Great Depression of the s. Despite defense related increases in , the lumber trade remained lethargic until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, , an event that triggered immediate military orders for lumber and the drafting of young men into the armed forces.

What followed was a critical labor shortage in the woods and mills, and large numbers of women entering the workforce in wood products plants. The months and years that followed the end of the war in August witnessed a great boom in logging and lumbering—new sawmills, a proliferation of gyppo operations, and a heady optimism in timber towns that the good times were here to stay.

The postwar years witnessed the increasing concentration of timberland ownership and lumber manufacturing. From a small financial base in Augusta, Georgia, the company began making large purchases of mills and timberland. Johnson Company and , acres in Toledo. During the first half of the twentieth century, a few investors—interested in the exclusive control of their work forces—purchased lush stands of timber in Oregon and built mills, logging railroads, and houses for their workers.

One of the largest company towns was the Kinzua operation in Wheeler County. Established in as a ponderosa pine production center, Kinzua housed residents at its peak. With the harvestable timber exhausted, the mill closed in , and the town was demolished. Valsetz, a company town established by Cobbs and Mitchell in the Coast Range west of Monmouth , opened in with a school, post office, and other accouterments of a viable community, characteristics shared by all company towns.

Boise Cascade purchased the timber and town in , tore up its railroad in the s, and then razed the town in Maxville in northern Wallowa County represented the efforts of Southern investors, who established the town in The owners brought with them skilled loggers and mill workers, including a sizable number of African Americans.

Frank Gilchrist , from Mississippi, established a town and mill operation in in northern Klamath County. An article of faith among private and federal foresters, especially in Oregon with its sizable volume of virgin timber, the practice produced record harvests, most of it on private land. Then, with private timber supplies diminishing in the late s, corporate lumbermen put pressure on the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to raise harvesting rates.

The federal agencies, in turn, aggressively promoted clear-cutting as a scientifically sound practice and increased the use of chemicals as a forest-management tool to control competing brush in newly planted plantations. Challenges to this strategy developed slowly in the s with environmentalists pressing courts to invoke the Endangered Species Act and similar laws that questioned the commodity management of federal forests.

The heaviest timber harvests involved private lands, but there were few regulations on that ownership class to protect forests and waterways. The laws were drafted by the lumber industry to stave off the threat of federal regulation of harvest practices, including clear-cutting. Federal environmental regulations, however, began to take a toll on both public and private land management when federal regulators banned the use of DDT in and the herbicide 2,4,5-T in to keep brush from competing with Douglas-fir and other tree species.

Those controversies, however, paled in comparison with the effect the northern spotted owl had on the industry in the early s. When District Judge William Dwyer prohibited national forest timber sales in potential spotted owl habitat in May , he set off years of litigation over animals and plants that had been listed as endangered. In the case of the spotted owl, classified as an indicator species, Dwyer accused the Forest Service and the U. Forest Service harvests in Oregon plummeted from a volume of 2 billion board feet in to a low of million board feet in The curtailment of federal timber sales in the s followed a decade of record harvests on the national forests, especially in Oregon.

Between the late s and , the harvest from federal forests fell by more than 90 percent, while cutting on all other forests fell by only 20 percent. A statistic from fiscal year indicates that forest industry land provided 74 percent of all forest products in the state. The total harvest of Oregon timber in was just under 4 billion board feet. Other factors explain some of the decline in timber industry employment, especially technological changes in the woods and mills making it possible for fewer workers to turn out an increasing volume of wood products.

New logging equipment, especially yarding machines, sharply reduced labor as a factor in harvesting. The most significant technological changes since the s, however, involved sawmills where laser-controlled, automated equipment has drastically reduced employment.

That trend is also true of Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Helens, Kenneth Ames, with senior author Herbert G.

Paul W. Jeffrey M. William G. Skip to main content. A project of the Oregon Historical Society. Search Search. Explore Entries A-Z Browse the complete list of entries. Entries by Themes Browse curated collections of entries. In addition to new technologies, smaller mills were shuttered, creating efficiency through economies of scale larger mills can produce more per worker.

The average production of sawmills operating in the western U. Lumber production per worker in Oregon is another way to look at efficiency gains.

It increased rapidly in the early s, going from , board feet per worker in to 1. It then dropped back to , board feet during the Great Recession. After the recession, production per worker increased to the elevated levels it had reached before the recession, reaching roughly 1.

Although the data has some error range, it appears that large efficiency gains were realized early in the s and may have slowed recently. While statewide the industry makes up only 1. For instance, in Douglas County 8. Most of the counties with a high concentration of employment in wood product manufacturing are rural.

In counties where the percent of total payroll exceeds the percent of total employment, average wages are higher in wood product manufacturing than the overall average wage. This is the case in most of the rural counties listed; indicating that wood product manufacturing provides some of the higher paying jobs in rural counties.

Eighty-five percent of the top 20 occupations require a high school diploma or less. Only general operations managers and industrial production managers typically require a college degree. Forecast Employment projections from the Oregon Employment Department show that wood product manufacturing employment growth is expected to slow, adding only new jobs between and Demand for wood products is expected to slow along with the overall economy and housing market.

Like many industries, wood product manufacturing has an aging workforce reaching retirement age. This creates additional demand for workers through replacement needs. In addition to the new jobs that the industry is expected to create between and , there are expected to be roughly 9, openings from people leaving the industry, largely due to retirements.

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