Lumbering Basic Industry: 0051.0264
LUMBERING CONTINUES AS MAIN BASIC INDUSTRY (by Nancy P. Miles)
The lumber industry has always been the mainstay basic industry in
In
The late Archie Leitch of
In
Timber resources receded from mill locations in the first decade and posed a log supply problem and many operations withdrew from production and pocketed their quick profits. Where railroad logging had been the order right-of-way grades and rotted ties are still apparent among the scrubby second-growth which surrounds the big stumps on
Companies which stayed in business moved with the times, adopting new methods to meet their own particular needs. Largest of these was B.C. Spruce Mills Ltd., an American firm which established the interior’s largest producer following purchase of the A.E. Watts Company at what was then Wattsburg and is now the abandoned
This company entered the field on a large-scale, long-term basis with its timber extending far up to the headwaters of the
This world-wide economic disaster led directly to the next phase of district lumbering, which was probably unique in
Cranbrook Foundry Ltd. was given specifications for this innovation and came up with an inexpensive small plant, compared with capital costs of a conventional producer, which moved easily hauled by teams, then trucks and finally tractors.
Companies which dug in and adopted this economical way of staying in business survived the black years of depression and for a few years operating sawmills became practically non-existent. The depression was weathered by the late 1930’s when there was even a cautious resumption of new building and lumber from the district, in addition to ties, began to flow to the open market instead of local consumption.
Nobody expected a revival on the scale of the war-boom however and since 1941 the industry has been in process of adjustment to taking its place in a national and world picture which is still in process. First reaction to the insatiable wartime demand for lumber, much of it for packaging material for shipment of armed forces supplies overseas, was a quantity of new portable mills set up any place where there was available timber with the rough lumber bought and shipped still damp and warm from the saw and paid for by a fiercely competitive buyers’ market.
Tractors were the chief mechanical change of the late depression and wartime boom era of the industry.
Postwar construction boom and continued and even accelerated demand for lumber strongly influenced facilities and methods of companies operating in this district. Rough lumber, warm and damp from inexpensive portable mills was no longer acceptable and small-scale producers of this, whose facilities went no further, either dropped out, or continued their production on a contract basis for planning by the larger companies which were emerging as part of the provincial industry.
In turn some of the larger companies able to finance improvements cautiously made a partial return to stationary sawmills but located as close as possible to a suitable large volume of timber and built planers as close as possible to railway shipping points for distant and export markets. Fleets of trucks shuttled constantly between the two, and some is marketed by truck but in general most is still rail-hauled.
Toward the end of the Second World War labor-management situation in the district also began to take its place in the whole picture. Operators affiliated in the British Columbia Lumber Manufacturers’ Association to establish a solid front in dealing with lumber industry problems as a whole, and workers organized in the International Woodworkers of America.
This began in 1944 and led to two restless years which concluded in district participation in a general strike in the industry through the province in 1946 which was concluded with the initial labor-management Master contract in the industry in the interior.
It was not settled without acrimony and bitterness on both sides, but it did make district operators an integral part of their national organization.
