Buying the Appalachian Timber

The Southern Appalachian area in the late 1880s was a lumber company owner's dream. The forested mountain areas of southern West Virginia, southwest Virginia, northeast Tennessee, and western North Carolina offered large tracts of virgin hardwoods in sparsely populated areas. It was also around this time that railroads were being built through the mounatins, making access to their forests much easier than before. This technological advancement gave the lumber companies the ability to move their heavy equipment into the mountains to harvest the giant trees of the region and transport them to the sawmills that were often several miles from the cutting site.

One of the first things that a logging company owner would do when looking for tracts of trees to buy was to send out a scout and surveyor to find how many of the trees in the area were suitable for harvest. If there were not enough good trees in the area, the timber would not be purchased; however, if the scouts determined that the area was suitable for harvest, the company would buy up the timber on the area for a certain price per acre of trees. The lumber companies rarely bought the land where the trees were located; instead, they only bought the rights to the trees, which did not bind them to the land which would ultimately lose its value because it had been denuded of its forests. After the tracts of timber were purchased, railroad lines were built into the forests in places that would most facilitate the removal of the hardwood.

At this point the logging camps and loggers would move into the forests via the railways and begin the harvesting process. The camps could be set up very quickly, and the loggers would immediately begin to cut the timber. After the suitable trees near the camp were cleared, the camp would then move a few miles down the tracks, and the loggers would begin clearing the new section of forest. The logging companies were constantly looking for new tracts of forests so that when the loggers would finish an entire tract, they could immediately move into a new acquisition and begin clearing the trees.