A Lumberman at Heart

by Marilyn Wick

From the Marin County Historical Society Magazine, vol. XVI, no. 1, 1991, pp. 8–9.


In Marin and San Francisco Robert Dollar was better known for his shipping business than as a lumberman, but as he himself states in his memoirs, "At Heart I am still a woodsman. I love the boom of the logs and the ring of the axe far more than the rush and roar of cities... Because I love both the wooded places and the sea, I do not find it hard at anytime to turn from one to the other."

Throughout his memoirs he states that lumbering was his first love and well it should be as he was literally born into the lumber business. His birthplace was the family quarters above the lumber company, Robert Melville & Co. of Falkirk, Scotland. Robert Melville was his maternal grandfather.

When his family migrated to Canada in 1858, his first job was in a logging camp one-hundred miles north of Ottawa. He relates the hardships of logging camps in the north woods at that time: the long winters, the roughness, the loneliness. To combat all these he used the time to educate himself until he was able to manage a camp three hundred miles from Ottawa. Two years later he bought his first timber when he and his brother became owners of a farm in the Muskoka District north of Toronto. They worked the farm and logged the stand of timber on it. Within four years in 1876 they were operating eight camps in the Muskoka District with headquarters in Bracebridge, Ontario.

From Ottawa and Ontario they moved south to Michigan where in addition to the logging they opened their first sawmill in 1882. The site was named Dollarville and although they sold it in 1887 the operation continued for thirty years.

The lumber business in North America moved from timber stands around each settlement farther and farther into the woods as the demand for lumber increased for building materials for ships, mines, cities and homes. As stands of timber nearby were depleted the search for new sources moved into more remote areas of the north, south, and west. Soon the supply was near depletion in the south and the supply of Canada and northern Michigan was found farther and farther from easy transportation. The search continued west. Minnesota timbers were the next source to be felled. About the same time, lumber interests heard of the apparently inexhaustible supply on the Pacific Coast. Familiar as they were with the smaller trees of the Northeast and smaller pines of the south, the huge redwoods, Douglas fir, cedar and others in the west promised unbelievable profits. They were not only large, they were near the water and therefore easy to cut and transport.

The big lumber companies on the West Coast around the turn of the century were founded by and carried the names of those lumbermen with experience gained in the Northeast and South. Names such as Pope, Talbot, and Walker who left Maine to own whole mill towns in the Northwest but make their headquarters in San Francisco; Robert Long left the South to found the city of Longview around his lumber mills in Washington and Longview is still a lumber town; H. R. MacMillan began in Ontario and his small beginnings in logging and mills in British Columbia soon became one of Canada's largest corporations; and perhaps the best known of all, Weyerhauser came via Minnesota to found the largest lumber firm in the world.

The trees were larger and the first cuts were easier to transport but as they moved farther away from the shores of the deep harbors, transportation became more difficult. The ground did not harden with the cold as it did in the Northeast and many of the streams were not deep enough to carry the big logs to ships at the coast. The profitable stands were found farther and farther away and often in canyons and mountainsides too steep for easy acquisition. Only with the inventions of the donkey engines and specialized rail transport did the enterprises grow.

Ellis Lucia in his book, The Big Woods describes the difference in lumbering in the West:

None of this timber production was easily won. Logging in the Pacific Northwest was a far hoot and holler from that of New England, the South, or the Lakes states, as the timber beasts learned upon drifting west before the turn of the century. The trees were whoppers, far bigger and heftier than anything they'd encountered, save for the redwood country of California. The big trees grew in rugged terrain—steep slopes and deep canyons that demanded all man and beast could muster in energy, muscle power, and ingenuity. The deeds were Herculean to meet the challenge; their god was Paul Bunyan, who did the impossible with ease and bravado.

I started life as a woodsman. I soon learned that in order to succeed a man must know more than one thing thoroughly. Many years have passed since I started looking away from the woods to the source of demand in the world markets. I found plenty of sale for my lumber and built up a steamship company as well. I knew that if I had only concerned myself with the cutting of trees and not the ultimate sale of those trees, I would never have advanced far ... As the years advanced, and I got deeper into the old problem of supply and demand, my business just naturally grew and I found myself, though still a lumberman, a ship owner as well.