John McGraw & Co. (lumber firm, c.1860-1877)

AI REVIEW:

McGraw & Co.: Pioneers of the Great Lumber Trade

Among the earliest major lumber concerns operating at Tonawanda was McGraw & Co., headed by John McGraw (1815–1877), a wealthy lumber manufacturer and merchant whose interests extended from the forests and sawmills of Michigan to the eastern markets of the United States.

Although later histories associated the great expansion of Tonawanda's lumber trade with the 1870s, an 1869 newspaper account reported that McGraw's firm had already been doing business here for nine years, placing its local beginnings around 1860. By 1869, the company reportedly operated extensive sawmills near Saginaw, Michigan, producing some 30 million board feet annually. Lumber traveled aboard company vessels to Tonawanda, where it was transferred to canal boats and railroads for shipment eastward.

The firm's early Tonawanda office was located with Burrows & Lane at the mouth of Tonawanda Creek. By the late 1870s, McGraw & Co. occupied an extensive waterfront establishment on Manhattan Street, comprising more than six acres, 1,600 feet of dockage, railroad connections, and storage for approximately ten million board feet of rough lumber.

McGraw's substantial fortune also made him an important benefactor of Cornell University, where his name survives on McGraw Hall. Following his death in 1877, the Tonawanda business appears to have continued under Ira D. Bennett, previously its general manager, whom an 1880 account identifies as McGraw's successor. The precise circumstances of that succession remain to be established.