Quiz time!
What was the leading industry in Texas at the turn of the 20th century?
Oil? – No, that came later.
Cattle? Cotton?
The answer: Lumber.
Lumber? Are you kidding? I live in Texas. There are no trees. Oh, we’ve got some scrubby little mesquite and an occasional oak, but nothing that this California native would call a tree. So how in the world did the lumber industry out-perform cattle and cotton, two Texas staples?
Well, as anyone who has ever driven across this great state can tell you, Texas is a big place. Yes we have desert regions and prairie and grassland and hill country, but over in the southeast is a lovely section called the Piney Woods. And as the railroad worked it’s way west in the 1870’s and 1880’s, lumber men from Pennsylvania like Henry Lutcher and G. Bedell Moore saw the virgin forests of east Texas as a gold mine. Local boys like John Henry Kirby got in on the action, too, buying up and consolidating individual sawmills into complete lumber manufacturing plants. By merging 14 sawmills into the Kirby Lumber Company in 1901, Kirby gained fame as the “Prince of the Pines” for becoming the biggest lumber manufacturer in the state. Sales skyrocketed after the implementation of an analytical scale, which provided precise weight measurements.
Not only did the railroad boom make travel to the Texas woods easier, it was also one of the biggest sources of demand for timber. Railroads needed lumber to construct rail cars, stations, fences, and cross ties in addition to the massive amounts of wood they burned for fuel. Each year railroads needed some 73 million ties for the construction of new rail lines and the maintenance of old ones, estimated by the magazine Scientific American in 1890. From the 1870s to 1900, railroads used as much as a fourth of national timber production.
This combination of supply and demand fueled a “bonanza era” for the Texas lumber industry that lasted 50 years, from 1880 until the Great Depression. During this time, Texas became the third largest lumber-producing state in the nation.
Northern investors swooped in to buy up land, sometimes even taking advantage of “use and possession laws” to seize property from families who had owned it for generations. Corruption abounded as logging companies controlled their workers, paying them only in vouchers for the company store despite the incredibly hazardous working conditions. These “cut and get out” operations left acres of land decimated.
This is the climate in which my next book, Short-Straw Bride, is set. Travis Archer and his brothers own a prime piece of forested land that also happens to be the key to connecting investor Roy Mitchell’s holdings to the railroad. Mitchell wants the ranch and is willing to get it any way he can. But the woman he’s been courting (to get his hands on her inheritance, which just happens to be more piney woods land) overhears him plotting to take the Archers out. Meredith Hayes has secretly carried a torch for Travis since he rescued her when she was a girl of ten. When she hears the threat, she knows she has to warn Travis. Unfortunately, her good deed goes awry and she ends up with more trouble than she bargained for. She ends up a short-straw bride.
Short-Straw Bride releases June 1st. If you’d like to read the first two chapters, click here.
