Skip to main content

Lumbering Before Pinchot

March 2023
5min read

The short, loud death of Canaan Valley

When the Europeans first saw the New World, their overwhelming impression was of trees, an endless forest covering a continent. And even in the boundless timberland that was eastern North America, West Virginia’s Land of Canaan was extraordinary, for it contained the finest stand of climax red spruce in the world.

The canoe-shaped Canaan Valley itself, 150 miles west of present-day Washington, D.C., was not big—little more than 14 miles long and 3 miles wide. It was boxed in by three rugged mountain ridges, shrouded in misty fog, and utterly silent. The novelist Rebecca Harding Davis, writing in 1880, called the region’s absolute stillness “strange and oppressive as noonday” and wrote that “human voices were an impertinence in the great and wordless meanings of the woods.”

To the lumbermen who rode in with the railroad half a decade later, the meanings were clear enough. A good stand of hardwood timber in West Virginia yielded fifteen thousand board feet per acre. Exceptional stands would yield as much as twenty thousand. The finest stands of white pine in the great northern forests of Michigan and Minnesota produced forty thousand. From parts of Canaan Valley the lumberjacks would haul eighty to a hundred thousand board feet per acre of red spruce.

For four hectic decades the boom times the lumbermen thrust upon this stillness were to rival the gold and silver rushes of the West in brawling intensity and in return on investment. And when it ended, Canaan Valley and its surroundings would be utterly destroyed.

It would have been an outcome inconceivable to the awed members of the survey party that discovered the valley. On Monday, October 13, 1746, a group that included the thirty-eight-year-old Col. Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s father, climbed to the top of Cabin Mountain and looked down on Canaan’s forest for the first time. The next day the party plunged into the valley itself.

It took a bit more than a generation to reduce the Canaan Valley to stumps. After the clearing, fires would smolder for months.

A surveyor named Thomas Lewis wished he had never come. He wrote in his journal that “from the … time We Entred the Swamp I Did not See aplain Big Enough for aman to Lye on nor a horse to Stand.”

The party encountered a vast clutching understory of eight- to ten-foot-high “loral” (rhododendron) that twisted across the forest floor, “all most as Obstinate as if Composed of Iron. Our horses and often our Selves fell into Clefts & Cavitys without seeing the danger Before we felt the Effects of it.”

On leaving, Lewis made a last entry: “Never was any poor Creaturs in Such a Condition as we were in nor Ever was a Criminal more glad by having made his Escape out of prison as we were to Get Rid of those Accursed Lorals.”

Many early settlers felt the same way. A century later one wrote that the valley was “as perfect a wilderness as our continent contained … a howling wilderness of some twenty or thirty miles’ compass, begirt on all sides by civilization, yet unexplored.”

The valley was a relic of the last glacial age. When the Wisconsin ice sheet had crept down from the North to within a hundred or so miles twenty thousand years before, Canaan became a frost pocket, high and cold—perfect for red spruce.

Nobody knows how the valley got its name, but in time, under the battering of West Virginia usage, the biblical “Cane-un,” with its accent on the first syllable, became “Kah-nane,” with the accent hard on the last syllable.

As late as the mid-1880s, on the eve of its destruction, the forest was virtually as Lewis had seen and hated it.

Henry Gassaway Davis changed that. In 1866 Davis, a railroad man and politician, convinced the West Virginia legislature to incorporate his Potomac and Piedmont Coal and Railroad Company with powers, rights, and franchises to do almost everything. By 1881 Davis, then a U.S. senator, had involved so many of his colleagues in his enterprises that the line working its way toward Canaan Valley came to be known as the “senatorial railroad.” On November 1, 1884, the last spike was pounded into the stretch of the senatorial railroad that ran into the brandnew town of Davis on the rim of Canaan Valley. Not long afterward a Pennsylvania lumberman named Jacob Leathers Rumbarger built a band-saw mill on the Blackwater River between Second and Third Street. The first of some thirty-one miles of logging railroads began to push their twisting way into the once impenetrable valley. From a population of two in 1884, Davis swelled to four thousand—a town that in time came to include seven churches, an equal number of saloons, a tannery, two banks, a second major sawmill, two butcher shops, two undertakers, five doctors, two dentists, five restaurants, and four hotels.

In the mid-nineties, a twelve-hundred-seat opera house went up on the corner of Henry Avenue and Second, within easy hearing of the sawmill’s exhaust engines. Under the illumination of that pale and flickering novelty, the electric light, audiences watched Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ten Nights in a Bar-Room .

The short-lived lumber camps that fed the boom hung uncertainly to the slopes of plunging hillsides, and they lasted only as long as the lumber lasted. But while they did exist, they were microcosms of a special kind of life. Far from the reach of any recognizable police force, they were ordered by a code of conduct all their own. The men worked from dawn to dark and were generally too tired to raise hell even if they wanted to.

The lumberjacks came in from all across the Eastern and Northern forests. When the Blackwater Boom and Lumber Company bought out Rumbarger in 1887, it imported French Canadians from the North, who were expert at riding the floating logs that sometimes filled the Blackwater River from bank to bank for twenty-five miles.

Jacks in their suspenders, their Wisconsin cork shoes, and their Richie shirts swarmed into the valley from Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and from as far away as Austria, Italy, and Sweden.

True to Napoleon’s dictum, this army moved on its stomach. The most important job in the lumbering camps of Canaan, next to the foreman himself, was the cook. He pulled top wages—three dollars a day for a seven-day week. If he was good, he was more than worth it. A cook could make or break a camp overnight.

The typical dinner menu at the talkless tables in the camps ran to boiled or roast beef, port, or steak, tomatoes, turnips, potatoes, beans, hash, cornbread, two different kinds of pies (quartered), and cake and cookies. Breakfasts were no less prodigious: flapjacks, hot biscuits, steak, fried eggs, fried potatoes, oatmeal, cake, doughnuts, and all the Arbuckles—coffee—a man could drink.

A full complement of lumberjacks included swampers (road builders), a cutting crew of sawyers and knot bumpers who felled and trimmed the trees, teamsters who drove the horses that skidded the logs to the road or river, grab drivers to secure the trail of logs, and a blacksmith and a saw filer (both well paid, as much as $2.50 a day—just below a cook’s wages).

Presiding over these crews, which in a typical camp might number sixty men, was the foreman, perhaps the most important man in the conquest of the forest. The autocrat of the camp, he did the hiring and the firing, and nobody questioned his judgment. He was responsible to the woods superintendent, but a good foreman would buck even the super in the interest of his camp.

The waste that attended the obliteration of the spruce and hemlock forest was staggering.

It took such men a bit more than a generation to reduce Canaan Valley to stumps. Shorn of the tall spruce that had kept it dark for centuries, stripped of its ironlike rhododendron understory, the dense valley floor lay open to the sunlight. It dried. And fires followed, enormous raging fires that burned to the bottom of the humus layer and smoldered for months.

One blaze broke out on the thirtieth of May, 1914, in the woods of Blackwater Canyon, three miles above the small lumber town of Hendricks, and burned for months. A man sitting on his porch in the town at midnight that summer could read the afternoon paper by its light.

The waste that attended the obliteration of the forest was staggering. When the large stand of hemlock that coexisted with the spruce ceased to sell during the Panic of 1893, hemlock bark went to the tanneries, and the huge peeled logs were left to decay.

Despite the waste, the Canaan region yielded up more than three billion board feet of lumber. Its one hundred thousand acres were only about oneeiehtv-fifth of the total virgin forest cut in West Virginia in the hectic fifty years of the last and first quarters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But its output represented one-tenth of the thirty billion board feet the state produced in those years. It was a prodigious pocket of timber. And finally it was gone.

“We didn’t leave a stick standing,” one company official boasted.

The lumbermen moved north or west, Davis faded away to the quiet community of eight hundred people that it is today, and the Canaan Valley was left again to silence as profound—if not as awe-inspiring—as the one the lumbermen had first disturbed just forty years earlier.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "February/March 1991"

Authored by: Morley Safer

A civilian adventurer gave us the best artist’s record of America in Vietnam.

Authored by: Richard Sloan

When William Withers, Jr., stepped up to the conductor’s podium at Ford’s Theatre that April evening, he believed the greatest triumph of his career was just a few minutes away

Authored by: John Steele Gordon

At its roots lie fundamental tensions that have bedeviled American banking since the nation began

Authored by: Roy Hoopes

In a classic model of government corruption, the promoters placed shares of the company's stock “where it will do most good"—in the pockets of key Congressmen

 

Authored by: Sharon Kay Skeel

In an age when the best black artists were lucky to exhibit their work at state fairs, Henry Ossawa Tanner was accepted by the most selective jury in France

Authored by: T. H. Watkins

Ninety years ago a highborn zealot named Gifford Pinchot knew more about woodlands than any man in America. What he did about them changed the country we live in and helped define environmentalism.

Authored by: Jack Waugh

The short, loud death of Canaan Valley

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.