W.M. Ritter began building his lumber empire in 1890. Ritter's early operations included logging sites in Mercer, McDowell, and Mingo Counties, West Virginia; Buchanan and Dickenson Counties, Virginia, and Pike County, Kentucky. He later moved into Tennessee and North Carolina as well. His first band mill was constructed at Avondale in McDowell County, West Virginia, in 1899. Ritter's success and rapid expansion as a lumber magnate stemmed from his ability to work closely with railroads, such as the Norfolk and Western, and the Big Sandy and Cumberland. His agents would purchase the lumber rights held by the railroads or they would buy the rights directly from the mountain people who owned them. It was not unusual for Ritter agents to pay as little as twenty-five cents a piece for the great trees of the region. Once the rights were purchased, the land was promptly stripped of its trees. The timber was then either shipped to mills by train or drifted down river to log ponds and mill works.

The W.M. Ritter Company was organized in 1901. By 1913, the company owned over two billion feet of hardwoods located in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. By 1940, the company had harvested more than three billion feet and had 70 to 100 million feet of lumber in storage, including white and red oak, ash, basswood, poplar, walnut, cherry, and birch. The lumber was often stored just outside the sawmill, and often would later be shipped out by the same railroad company that had brought the logs from the forests to the sawmill. Much of this wood was sold to contractors to make fine furniture and flooring. In fact, all of the flooring of the old Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago as well as many of the floors in the great houses and palaces of Europe were made of Ritter Company products. Even car and truck bodies were at times made from Ritter hardwoods.

The Ritter Company and many other lumber companies were formed in the area during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, when lumber companies, like many other industries, did not face governmental regulations and had complete authority over the forests that they purchased. The companies rarely purchased land, but would pay the owners of the land for the rights to their forested areas. The lumber companies would then clear-cut, or completely remove, the trees and move on to places where there were more trees to cut. This often left the landowners with barren land that was very prone to flooding. Flood problems often last until the second-growth forests, or the trees planted to replace the clear-cut virgin forest, are mature, healthy trees. Many places in Southern Appalachia still suffer from the flooding caused by logging and lumbering.

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The W.M. Ritter Company's later places of operation in the Southern Appalachians included: Dickenson County in Virginia; Scott and Carter Counties in Tennessee; Caldwell, Burke, Avery, Swain,and Macon Counties in North Carolina; Boone, Raleigh, McDowell, and Wyoming Counties in West Virginia; and smaller properties in Kentucky, South Carolina, and Georgia.

The W.M. Ritter Company was in business from 1895 to 1960, when the company was bought by another powerful lumbering company, Georgia Pacific, which was the largest lumbering company in the South. The only other companies that were larger at that time were both located in the Pacific Northwest.