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Working The Bay:
Nineteenth Century Industries: Lumber |
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After the American Revolution, Massachusetts and Maine no longer sent white pines to Britain for naval ship masts. Instead, they used them for local shipbuilding, and milled lumber for a growing building market. By the mid-nineteenth century, Bangor was the “Lumber Capital of the World,” and often shipped more than 200,000,000 board feet annually. Between 1832 and 1888, Bangor shipped out 8.7 billion board feet of lumber.
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Trees were cut in the late fall and winter, when it was easier to move them on snow to the nearest river. In spring, using rivers swelled by snowmelt and rain, loggers floated logs downstream to places like Bangor and Ellsworth. There sawmills cut logs into long lumber called deals for beams, planks, and boards, or into small lumber for shingles, clapboards, laths, and fence posts.
Winter lumbering complemented shipping. Ice often blocked the Penobscot River from December through March.
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Once navigation opened, the spring rivers brought winter cut lumber down river, where a fleet of vessels carried it to the expanding cities of the U.S. eastern seaboard, the Caribbean, and South America.
Steam tugs, introduced on the river sometime before 1850, could, for a fee, make the passage up and down the river much faster. Many sailing captains, however, chose to save towing charges. The larger schooners of the 1870s helped more lumber reach a bigger market.
In 1860, there were 3,376 vessel arrivals in Bangor.
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