City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry

In the second half of the nineteenth century, San Francisco emerged as the leading metropolis of the Far West and became famous for its thriving port, mild climate, and scenic beauty. Its boosters were especially proud of the stately masonry buildings going up around the city, but for the most part it looked like a sprawling frontier boomtown. From its heady founding days, tens of thousands of frame houses were erected all over the hills in a mad rush of city building. The construction of these charmingly decorated houses provided steady employment for carpenters and plentiful contracts for planing mills. Supplying the building industry with lumber was a big business in its own right and grew into one of the region’s largest industries.In his new book, James Michael Buckley makes a welcome contribution to the study of San Francisco and the historical geography of Northern California by chronicling the growth of the redwood lumber industry between the 1850s and the late 1920s. By profession, the author is a historian of architecture, but his book is more ambitious than most works of architectural history. Buckley takes the city-building process as a whole as his subject, and he has spent years documenting one of the key building material industries on which it depended. It should be noted that this book is not a comprehensive history of the redwood lumber industry; rather, it is an exploration of how lumber production shaped the cultural landscape of a region.Historians of San Francisco have long emphasized the “imperial” character of the city and studied how its wealth was generated by exploiting the natural resources of the West. Buckley’s book complements this scholarship with a story about an aggressive industry launched from the urban core that laid waste to the forests. What makes his book unique is his attention to the vernacular built environments that were created along the “value chain” of a geographically dispersed industry. A vast industrial landscape took shape to transform trees into lumber, in which thousands of people lived. Buckley interprets these places as sites of work, leisure, and struggle, and seeks to help us “picture the historical theater of capital-labor relations” (264).The redwood lumber industry got started in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-nineteenth century when small logging outfits cut down the old-growth forests close to the city. Some of the first lumberjacks came from New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces, and they soon realized that logging redwoods presented unique challenges. Virtually every stage of the production process was supersized to transform the world’s largest trees into lumber. While they were busy deforesting the Bay Area, other entrepreneurs moved into the coastal forests of Northern California. By the late nineteenth century, Humboldt County was the center of the most important lumber district in the state.The bulk of Buckley’s book focuses on documenting the landscape of the redwood lumber industry as it reached maturity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Starting his tour of the industry in the forests of Humboldt County, he surveys the ramshackle logging camps, sawmill villages, and logging railroads that transported rough-sawn lumber to the sea. He then chronicles the growth of the great lumber town of Eureka on Humboldt Bay, where ships were loaded up for the voyage down the coast. We finally learn about San Francisco’s lumber district, located on the waterfront south of Market Street, where lumber was transformed into shingles, trim, railroad ties, and a hundred other building products.Many of these places no longer exist, and Buckley draws on his expertise in vernacular architectural history to bring them back to life. Using period photographs, insurance maps, and other sources, he sympathetically describes these peripheral industrial environments and enables us to imagine them peopled with lumberjacks, sawmill hands, and dockworkers. On the whole, the world of lumber production was bleak, isolated, and masculine. Sadly, it seems the ancient redwood forests were not appreciated by workers as places of recreation, or at least they were no match for the saloon, billiard hall, and brothel.In the early twentieth century, corporate logging operations muscled into a market that had been dominated by sole proprietorships. Using their greater financial resources, they built proper company towns, more sophisticated sawmills, and better rail connections that provided access to the national market. Back in San Francisco, the waterfront planing mills were relocated to new industrial suburbs throughout the Bay Area, where they enlarged their facilities and avoided being hassled by the Building Trades Council and its boycotts. By this time, the redwood lumber industry not only supplied the building industry of San Francisco but also helped to build up cities all along the Pacific Coast and particularly in Southern California.The cultural landscape of the redwood industry was largely created by employers, but workers modified it on the margins. Even in all-encompassing company towns, small commercial strips enabled workers to escape supervision and find a moment of relaxation. Buckley’s treatment of labor conflict is episodic, but the history of organized labor forms a key narrative thread in his book. Classics of California labor history, including Michael Kazin’s Barons of Labor (1987) and Daniel A. Cornford’s Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire (1987), are amply cited. Generally speaking, architectural historians have never taken much interest in labor history, and the author’s engagement with this literature is noteworthy.Today the old houses of San Francisco are a popular attraction on tours, which usually interpret them through the lens of local architectural history. By rights they should also be seen as physical artifacts of the lumber industry and products of the labor of thousands of individuals who toiled across the region. In recognizing the contributions of this industry to the making of California’s cities, there is ample opportunity as well to promote greater public awareness of the environmental damage it wrought. In the span of a century, according to the author, 95 percent of the original redwood forests of Northern California were decimated.