“Things Was Different in the South”: The industrialization of pulpwood harvesting systems in the Southeastern United States 1945–1995

Abstract

By contrast with Eastern Canada, it took a long time for mechanized systems to transform woods work in the American Southeast. The Southeast experienced a more episodic, delayed and less complex transformation of woods work, one marked by ‘making do”, incremental innovations, simpler systems, a reliance on the adaptation of ideas and machines developed elsewhere, and the tendency for a single harvesting system to dominate use over long periods of time. We argue the social, economic and environmental conditions of the Southeast after 1945 facilitated a laissez-faire attitude to pre-industrial harvesting methods by pulp and paper mill owners. The most important of these conditions was that alternative employment for rural African-Americans was slow to develop, leaving a large source of cheap, available labour for woods work. Pulp mill owners were able to outsource the provision of wood to small contractors through a network of local intermediaries called “wood dealers”. The wood supply system created by pulp mill owners placed the costs of innovation into the hands of the poorly capitalized harvesting contractors. This wood supply system delivered mill owners wood at very low prices, but it effectively inhibited steady and thoroughgoing innovation for many years.