The Budworm and the Mill: The Pulp and Paper Industry in Maine, 1975-1985

Steven Tatko
Professor Opal
HI 200 Research Project

           

 

 

            An unusual record was set in 1856 in Westbrook, Maine by the S. D. Warren Company as they became the largest importer of rags in the world for the purpose of manufacturing paper.  Up until the 1860's paper making involved the pulverizing of discarding clothing to produce pulp.  The process was simple and inexpensive requiring no natural resources to sustain it other than the water power that flowed through New England rivers and streams.  These basic hammer mills continued to pound out pulp from cloth in America until a great shortage of rags occurred in the 1860's as mechanically printed daily newspapers increasingly gained popularity.  European paper makers had witnessed shortages of rag material for centuries prior to the 1860's  and consequently had introduced the process of incorporating saw dust into the rag mixture to lessen the amount of cloth needed to create the pulp for the paper molds; the first great change the paper industry was to face.  
In 1868 a saw mill in Topsham, Maine began to produce paper in the space below the slide rails and carriage of the main head rig.  As the saw dust fell from the saw above it was collected and beaten with a simple hammer mill then used as pulp the same as the rags had once been.  This crude paper making venture was the first in America to produce paper entirely of wood fiber. In 1875 S. D. Warren, the largest producer of paper in Maine at that time, converted their operations to use strictly wood fibers to produce paper.  Within five years they were the largest manufacturer of paper in the world, a title they held until 1902 when Great Northern Paper Company opened their plant in Millinocket, Maine and produced within the first six months twice the amount of paper the S. D. Warren mill could make in a year.
Maine was a paper maker's paradise with fast flowing rivers to power the turbines of the manufactory, and at the head of every stream, hundreds of thousands of acres of fertile forest to feed the demand of the tub grinders and trip hammers.  The use of Maine logs harvested in the wooded north turned from dimensional lumber to pulp for the production of paper.  Pulp was king of the woods from the early days of the 1860's and 70's to the 1960's as Maine led the nation in the manufacturing of paper.  
            The Period before the spruce budworm epidemic of 1975 to 1985 can be classified as a period of continued growth and overall confidence in the reliability of the Maine pulp and paper industry.  The companies were successful and their employees enjoyed some of the highest industrial wages for their day.  The only elements of change of the era were increasing profit margins and production rates.  By the 1970's, the situation had begun to move in a new and difficult direction.  The future became uncertain and times became tense in the decade between 1975 and 1985.  It is the purpose of this paper to examine the events of that era that made it such a critical turning point for the manufacturers of paper within the State of Maine.                       
Stability had begun to fade in the turbulent 1970's as the Pulp and Paper Industry underwent its first round of changes since the great shift away from rags to the use of wood for pulp.  The sweeping changes from the period of 1975 to 1985 centered around, and hidden behind, the spruce budworm resulted ultimately in difficult times for the
Paper Industry within the state of Maine.  The pest that created both a legitimate reason, and a shield behind which to hide much deeper rooted problems, manifested itself in the
form of a small cocoon about one centimeter long that attached itself to thousands of fir trees.  Facing hard times in the 1970's and 80's, the paper companies of Maine used issues relating to the budworm to try to improve their business conditions within the state.  There were many new shifts in the areas of labor, politics and silviculture that represented an evolving industry.  Change was in the wind even before the mature budworm moths floated down from Quebec into the north woods, change that would come from both the economic and political sectors.  
In the 1830's when the system of the logging camps had become established in northern Maine, men from farms and cities traveled up river in the fall and stayed in the woods cutting timber until the spring freshets carried the saw logs and pulp bolts to the mills below.  These men were paid by the day on prearranged wages that were independent of their production rates, and in many cases their work was done with company owned tools.  With the coming of World War Two, a huge swell in the demand for wood and a shortage of manpower to harvest the timber, employers switched to a system of payment based on the production of the individual logger.
            Traditionally, the terms "cord" for pulpwood and "board feet" for saw logs were words only used by bosses and scalers.  With woodsmen being paid by the cord and the thousand board feet, everyone became concerned with production rates and wood volume.  The shift to piece production waged labor greatly affected the logger and the employers.  For generations logging was salary work where employees were paid a fixed
rate which meant that the pace was slow and wood was always in demand.  Employers greatly benefited from the switch to production based pay because now they only paid
employees who produced labor in measurable quantities.  No longer were workers paid for not producing.  Paying woodsmen for their individual production, had the effect of standardization across many companies so that men were paid the same amount for a cord of wood no matter for which company they were employed.  This standardization took the security out of woods work and made it "god damn tricky to find and keep a steady chance while employed for any company."
            The new breed of piece rate woodsmen developed work ethics driven by production.   The fast pace was so high that by the mid 1950's most men worked alone in the woods felling and piling pulpwood trees with tools they now owned out right.  Men found they could make more money alone than in teams as they once had done.  Loggers became known as "cutter men" rather than the traditional term of woodsmen.  The name change symbolized in many respects the quickened pace of woods work as men now focused solely on clearing the sticks from the stump.  These cutter men of the late 1950's became attached to paper companies in ways that the old woodsmen had never been.  In the days prior to standardization, it was not unusual for a woodsman to leave one logging camp to seek higher pay in another.  Now with equal wages, men simply had to "buckle down and work like hell to make a decent wage."
            Slowly the logging camps disappeared as cutter men began to operate independently living at home on the weekends and spending the week nights in trailers
and portable camps in the woods.  Into this new era of cutter men and fast paced work, the lowly budworm floated down from Canada in the spring of 1975.  The Spruce
Budworm had last made a devastating appearance in 1918 when it drifted through the woods killing fir and spruce trees throughout the northern part of the state.  Budworm epidemics have regularly swept over much of Maine in sixty year cycles.  
The budworm causes damage to soft wood stands by attaching its cocoon to the reproductive structures of conifers.  The newly emerged budworm will eat away at the reproductive buds of the host, effectively killing the tree.  While infected trees can be cut and used for pulp and even low grade saw logs, the harvesting must be done soon after the tree is killed, or it will succumb to rot and loose any value it might have.  While most of the infected trees from the 1918 outbreak were salvaged and utilized, timberland owners were deeply concerned in 1975, because the new blight seemed to have covered more acreage.  From its rapid start the budworm reached its fullest extent  in 1978 when 2,017,600 acres of commercially owned spruce-fir forest were infected out of the 7,949,400 acres then industrially owned.
By 1970, much of the land in the state of Maine was, and still is, owned by multinational paper companies who have used Maine timber to feed their mills.  In 1975 the seven major companies in the state were International Paper Company, Great Northern Paper Company, Diamond Paper Company, St. Regis Pulp and Paper Company, Scott Paper Company, Georgia Pacific Pulp and Paper Company and Boise Cascades Paper Company.  Of the seven, Great Northern Paper Company was the largest producer in tons of paper products.  These companies owned over one third of the land within the state of Maine, an area bigger then the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island
combined.  Timber management companies such as Seven Islands and Prentice and Carlisle owned or supervised another third of the state.  These large landowners were deeply worried by their rapidly infected forests as a result of the budworm.
The quickened pace of work of the cutter men was asked to increase as owners looked to salvage their investments by harvesting wood damaged by the budworm.  The rush was on and cutter men were hurrying to keep up.  “Get it out or loose out” became the slogan from the company meeting rooms to the jobber trailers out in the forest as wood was cleared from the stump as quickly as possible to get it to the mills before the budworm could take affect.  In an effort to hasten the pace of woods work machinery was becoming very prevalent.  Chainsaws were the first means of mechanization many loggers utilized in the 1950s, and by the 1970s they had completely replace axes and Swede saws in the harvesting of pulp and saw logs.  By the mid 1960s skidders made an appearance in the forests as a means of hauling freshly cut trees from the site of the stump to a yard to be trucked away.  Skidders replaced horse teams only gradually at first, but the demand for wood soon increased their prevalence.  While chainsaws and skidders became staples of the logging industry, it was the mechanical harvester that would symbolize the push made by paper companies for more and more wood.
            Mechanical harvesters fell, limb, and carry away tree length logs from the site of the stump to a yard or other landing to be transported to the mill.  The average cutter man
could fell, limb and buck up in four foot lengths approximately ten cords of wood per day using only a chainsaw and a cable skidder.  A mechanical harvester is capable of harvesting 100 cord a day on good ground and is operated by only one man.  The largest
of the mechanical harvesters was the Koehring Feller Forwarder which felled trees with a processing head on the boom of an excavator and then loaded the un-limbed trees up to 70 feet in length into an attached dump truck body.  Only four of these giants were made for the Great Northern Paper Company at an individual cost of $600,000 for the specific purpose of clearing land to fight the budworm.  One of these machines could do in a day the same amount of work that a crew of 3 skidders with two men to a skidder team could do in a week.  The Koehings were operated twenty two hours a day with only a two hour shut down period for maintenance.
These harvesters had limitations however.  They only could operate in wide open spaces, mandating that clear cut methods of harvesting be used.  A skidder and a cutter man are capable of operating in thick undergrowth and selectively cutting individual trees and leaving developing trees alone.  Both skidders and mechanical harvesters were very expensive pieces of machinery that were out of the financial reach of most cutter men.  In 1976 a brand new state of the art Timberjack cable skidder cost $30,000 and a mechanical harvester cost well over $275,000.  Both pieces of machinery were needed however, to keep up with the demands of the paper companies for more wood. Independent Jobbers would make contracts with paper companies or land management firms to cut on their land based on predetermined amounts of wood to be harvested.  A piece of ground to be cut was known as a “chance.”  "The company assigns you a chance and tells you to cut 250 cord off from it each week, and you got no way in hell to keep up without two or three skidder crews or one good harvester."
In the late 1960's paper companies became loan agencies as they started to lend money to cutter men to purchase machinery.  The jobbers would take out a loan on a piece of equipment from a paper company and cut wood off that company’s land and then turn around and pay their wages back to the company to reduce the debt they had incurred from their skidders.  "They'd have ya where they wanted ya.  They set tha' loan rate, and then they set your pay!" A contract with a land owner was not a sacred document by any means.  "As soon as they got ya to start buyin' and gatherin' debt, they'd yank your chance and leave ya' hangin'!"  Chances were pulled from cutter men due to bad weather that caused deep mud which would damage the tree regeneration if mechanical equipment was used, or if the companies had met their wood quotas for a particular week.  In this fashion the cutter men (and the jobbers who employed them) were kept on a string by the paper companies due to the uncertainties of the forest industries in the 1970s and 80s.  The cutter men could never fully separate themselves from the paper companies due to the large amounts of debt they owed to them and the dependency they had on forest employment in a state with very few other job opportunities.
            Consistency was leaving the woods business in the 1970’s for the paper industry through new governmental legislation which greatly affected how forest and mill operations were conducted within the state of Maine.  For as long as it had existed, the paper industry had operated free from large amounts of governmental control, but with the 1970’s and emerging environmental laws, the old systems began to change.  The Maine Environmental Commission which was instituted in 1971 began to implement
legislation that would forever change industry in Maine.  The Federal Clean Air, Clean Water and Toxixic Substance Acts set the stage for change and accountability in the industrial world.  Paper companies were, for the first time, responsible for the pollutants that they emptied into the rivers and streams.  While emissions control had a large impact on the industry, the year 1976 saw one of the greatest changes effecting the forest products system.  For three centuries every stick of wood from the north was floated to the mills on river drives.  In 1975 the state of Maine passed laws requiring the drives to end for good in 1976.  While the clean air and water acts added costs to the manufacturing process in the form of fines and by requiring new filtration plants and sulphur dioxide scrubbers be installed at paper manufactories, the end of the river drives meant huge added transportation costs for the paper industry.
            The river drives enabled the paper companies to transport their wood from the forest to the mill for free.  Only the cost of labor factored into the amount paid to transport a cord of wood via a waterway.  It cost Scott Paper Company six cents in 1975
to transport a cord of wood on the river drive.  When Scott Paper was forced to switch to trucks in 1976 to haul the wood to its mills it cost $7.58 per cord.  For a company that utilized upwards of 250,000 cords of wood in 1976, a 126-fold increase in wood transportation costs was very dramatic.  
            Transportation and environmental practices were not the only areas affected by new legislation during the 1970’s, labor and taxation were also concerns.  While Workman’s Compensation insurance plans had existed well before the 1970’s, it was not until the pace of work increased dramatically that more and more laborers were
injured and forced to draw funds from those accounts.  Logging is dangerous work, second only to arctic crab fishing off the coast of Alaska for the occurrence of accidents. 
Cutter men and their skidder teams found it difficult to avoid injuries or unnecessary strain from trying to keep to the pace of work agreed upon in their contracts.  Falling trees is a dangerous venture that requires concentration to ensure that the felling procedure goes as planned.  When a cutter man is trying to fell enough trees to keep two skidders busy, safety is often forgotten.  Men were often pinned by fallen trees or struck by trees that would kick off the stump as they fell due to a sloppy felling cut.  Skidder operators often overturned their machines in a hurried effort to keep with the quickened pace.  In the early days of waged work, injuries were rare and usually not devastating because of the slower pace and no mechanization.  With heightened mechanization and faster production rates, cutter men were getting hurt more frequently than ever.
            As a result of an increase in injuries, cutter men began to draw workers compensation to make up for time lost due to injury.  Paper companies were petitioned increasingly for higher worker’s compensation rates so that men could financially survive the period that they were unable to work and earn wages.  The companies were forced to pay worker compensation quite regularly in the 1970’s.  Henry Magnuson, a spokes person for Scott Paper Company, summed up the sentiments of the industry, “Worker’s
compensation is certainly an added cost to industry as a result of the current situation.  It would appear to many on the board [of Scott Paper Company] that it has become increasingly more desirable to employ mechanical harvesters rather then company woodsmen to harvest our forest land.”  Mechanical harvesters do not draw worker’s
compensation and only require one operator to cut vast amounts of wood.  The paper companies eluded the issue of compensation by decreasing the number of men actually
employed by the firms to harvest timber.  More Jobbers were hired who were expected to pay workers compensation for their own employees and received no financial help from the paper companies to alleviate the added cost.
            While large companies were able to evade large worker’s compensation fees, they were not able to escape from large governmental taxation.  While land valuation and taxation had always been a troublesome issue to the existence of paper companies due to their large land holdings, when coupled with other new forms of taxation the fees presented hefty sums for the industry to have to pay.  In 1972 the old outdated forms of land valuation were replaced by new methods for determining taxation by the state which increased property taxes for many types of land use.
Timber land is difficult to tax because of the waiting period between harvests.  Wood that is growing on a piece of land makes no money for the owner unless it is cut down and utilized.  In fact, wood that is not utilized is a negative draw on the capital of the owner who is forced to pay the taxes to hold the land without the land actually regularly producing any profits.  The standard in forestry before the budworm of the 70’s was to allow twenty to thirty years between harvestings on a given piece of land that grew spruce and fir.  The period between the profits produced debts that could only be financed by owning large plots of land so that new sections were always coming of age to be harvested to pay for the cost of the others.  With the increases in taxation that
companies were experiencing they began to look for ways to stabilize their profits and ensure continued economic success.
            The budworm, in a strange twist of events, offered a chance for renewed stability for the pulp and paper industry.  The companies had been steadily loosing control of their ability to retain their profit margins with increased taxation and governmental control.  The industry did, however, still retain control over two very important factors, the ability to harvest their own forest lands, and the ability to manipulate the price of stumpage.  By requiring speedy removal of budworm damaged trees, and the clearing of healthy trees to prevent the spread of the budworm, the companies were able to keep the price of wood low.  “There was a tremendous over glut of wood in that era that drove everyone’s wages down considerably, so that all you could do was harvest more and more wood to make up for your low pay.  You ended up only adding to the low prices and really only screwing yourself.”
            In the process of harvesting wood from private land, two different prices are kept in mind, the price of stumpage paid to the owner of the land by the contractor for the removal of wood, and the price paid by the mill to the contractor for his product.  Stumpage prices are determined by the land owners who compare the prices charged byother land owners to their Jobbers.  With that seemingly arbitrary system of price adjustment, the paper companies were in a position to fully control one critical aspect of their industry, the acquisition of wood.
Jobbers who cut wood on paper company land had the price of stumpage subtracted from their final wage that they received, so it was in the industries’ best financial interest to keep the price of stumpage high.  In 1976 the stumpage price for a cord of spruce cut on paper company land was $7.25; by 1980 the price had risen to $10.50.  Spruce stumpage peaked in 1985 at $11.00 a cord and surprisingly, has held firm with little variation up to the present day.  The rise in stumpage was not greeted with a rise in the price paid per cord of wood to the contractor.  The flat rate for a cord of spruce accepted at the mill remained largely “stagnant for a long time which caused everybody to start losing money as the price of stumpage increased.”  The steady decline of profit for the contractor meant that they were increasingly dependant on the paper companies for work.  The jobbers needed to harvest more wood to equal pre-budworm wages, while the paper companies saved money due to higher stumpage prices.
            Forestry was the foundation of woods management plans for paper company land stewardship from the early 1900’s to the beginning of the outbreak of the spruce budworm.  Silviculture was cast to the wind as paper company ideology changed.  Pamphlets distributed by the forest service in the 1950’s detailed practices to deal with the budworm.  On their recommendation land owners needed only to remove fir and spruce trees over 10 inches in diameter to fight the budworm.  By the 1970’s however, silvicultural science was forgotten as the practice of clear cutting became a reality.  Over the three hundred year history of logging in Maine, clear cutting had never occurred as a management practice as it is very detrimental to the health of the forest regeneration.  Selective cutting was practiced if only for economic reasons as pine, fir and spruce were the three species in demand.  Deciduous trees were left standing as they had little to no market value.  In the days before the budworm the only trees that were harvested were those that met certain diameter and quality requirements.  Selective cutting had protected paper company lands for generations.
Paper companies were facing the strain of a new era of harvesting.  Two major changes occurred within the harvesting practices of large land owners; the acceptance of smaller diameter wood as a result of clear cutting and the integration of deciduous or hardwood trees into the production of pulp.  Clear cutting became accepted as a way to battle the budworm and drive the price of wood down.  After the year 1978, the acreage that was affected by the budworm started to dwindle yet the practice of clear cutting continued.  With machines such as the gigantic Koehring Feller Forwarder, selective cutting simply was not an option; its size simply did not allow it to operate using traditional selective cutting methods.  
A critical factor in the process of clear cutting is the removal of all the trees in a given amount of land.  Consequently, paper companies were left with large amounts of unused hardwood which traditionally had never been used for the production of paper.  Chemical engineers employed by the pulp and paper industry devised methods
to incorporate the use of hardwood into the pulp slurry to produce paper.  The paper industry in effect created a market for otherwise worthless low grade hardwood.  With the new introduction of the use of hardwood in the paper making process, clear cutting practices only increased as jobbers could now utilize more of the wood standing in the chances they were contracted to cut.  As a result of the influx of hardwood into the market, stumpage prices for deciduous trees rose to match those of soft wood such as fir and spruce.
            The harvesting of trees has long been a source of employment for the people of Maine.  The trees that grow have provided income for industrialists and cutter men alike.  The three hundred year history of timber in this state had long been one of continual harvesting and dependence on the resilience of the Maine woods to continue to produce crop after crop of trees.  Budworm epidemics had always been a threat to land owners and woodsmen alike, but up until the 1970’s their attacks had always landed on an industry that was very much in control of its future.  With the coming of the last budworm strike of the 70’s the face of the forest industry was forever changed by the practices that arose out of the panic.  Pulp and paper companies used the budworm as a way to respond to the loss of control they held over their industry.  The policy of financial gain over management for continued growth and longevity forever altered the woods business within the pine tree state.  It is perhaps highly ironic that something as large as the pulp and paper industry found it necessary to hide behind the cocoon of a worm and the wings of a moth.
            What is most interesting about the forest products industry within the state of Maine is the tension between jobs and profit.  The very reason that many people find themselves living in remote parts of the state stems directly from a need for manpower in the woods and mills.  The recent scarcity of jobs in many parts of the state has created tension between employers and employees on levels that now define the business of cutting wood in Maine.