64 – The Pilgrims Were Lumbermen

North American Lumber History

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American listeners.  As with most holiday lore, things get distorted and romanticized over the centuries.  The fact that the Puritans and Wampanoag were breaking bread over a war treaty against another tribe gets glossed over a lot.  But if the primary theme of today's reality TV is forming alliances who are we to look askance at the Mayflower colonists?  But like most of these expeditions, there was a financial backer who expected the colonists to send back products to be sold in the British and European markets.  Primarily this meant timber.  The North American lumber history starts with companies like the Plymouth Company or the British Navy who desperately needed lumber after denuding the highly limited resources of an island nation.  

Today I wax philosophically about the virgin forests of North America in the 1600s and wonder what it must have been like as a craftsman to suddenly get exposed to a while new litany of species and new working properties.