Tonawanda Industries: The growth of second lumber port in the world, transcription and article (Buffalo Courier, 1887-10-07).pdf
Dublin Core
Title
Description
- Lock built for Niagara-Creek access.
- Cleveland Commercial enterprise draws attention. McGraw opens up lumber business, which starts growing around 1870.
- To avoid high shipping costs, William H. Gratwick towed a massive raft full of lumber (3 million feet, or 20 canal boats' worth) from Bay City, Michigan to (North) Tonawanda over two weeks. People in the village marveled to see it. Gratwick paid the men well to see the lumber unloaded, and the incident drew attention to the Tonawandas' natural advantages as a lumber port.
- Other lumber firms described
- Box factory on Tonawanda Island
*AI transcriptions may contain errors, though I have done a few sanity checks*
TONAWANDA INDUSTRIES.
The Growth of the Second Lumber Port in the World.
EARLY DAYS OF THE TOWN,
A List of the Lumber Firms Doing Business There.
OTHER FORMS OF BUSINESS PURSUED.
The Rise in the Value of Real Estate in the Last Fifteen Years.
Like Buffalo, Tonawanda owes her growth primarily to the Erie canal, which here connects with the water-supply, the Niagara river. Her harbor affords excellent facilities for the transshipment of lumber and forest-products generally to the eastern markets. Previous to 1825, when the Erie Canal was planned and surveyed to this, its western termination, there was no village, not even a hamlet, in Tonawanda.
The first settlement was made in 1805 by three men, Alexander Logan, John King, and John Hershey. Henry Anguish, who in 1821 opened the first tavern at his residence, came in 1808, making his home near Tonawanda Creek, a short distance above the old Tonawanda burying ground. The only road from Tonawanda Creek to Buffalo was a rude highway extending along the Niagara shore from Buffalo to the Falls, little traveled, with nothing but a wretched scow ferry to carry wheeled vehicles over the creek. Very few settlers came, for what squatters there were on the low marshy land lying along the creek were subject to fever and ague from its annual floods.
Such was the situation until [1823], when a boat lock was constructed, as Mr. Lewis F. Allen noted in his interesting sketch of early days in Tonawanda, connecting the Niagara River with Tonawanda Creek, which was intended to be a part of the canal eastward twelve miles to Pendleton. A few enterprising capitalists of Buffalo—Townsend and Coit, Albert H. Tracy, Judge Samuel Wilkeson (the last named, with his partner, Dr. Ebenezer Johnson, having considerable contracts for canal labor there), Judge Latham A. Burrows of Oswego, and William Williams of Utica—bought a large tract of land on the south shore of the creek to take advantage of any commercial prospects of growth in the future.
It was at about this time also that the brothers James and John Sweeney, the former the father of James Sweeney of Buffalo, and who had previously been in the tailoring business with Elijah D. Efner of Buffalo, bought about 200 acres on the north side of the creek, fronting on the river, part of which is now the site of Smith and Fasset’s docks, and all of which is to prove a fortune to the heirs of James Sweeney. John left no children. Soon after making his purchase, James Sweeney with his family became a resident of Tonawanda, where he built a log house and furnished it most comfortably. When the Erie Canal was finished, a rude bridge was thrown across the creek, and over this stagecoaches daily passed to and from the Falls.
The little hamlet increased very slowly, as Mr. Urial Driggs, Joseph I. Bush, John Simpson, Benjamin Long, and others bought land and settled on the south side of the creek, the Sweeneys holding and controlling their extensive lands on the north side.
On the whole, however, the town slumbered. There was little life within the northwestern part of Erie County. A few log houses, a tavern or so, and a store were all that existed on the present site of Tonawanda, which, together with Grand Island, then unbroken forest, was part of the territory of Buffalo. One of the three days of the annual November election was held there, creating quite a commotion in its usually monotonous existence.
Even in the earliest days, however, the principal trade of Tonawanda was in wood. When it was unredeemed marshland, subject to constant overflows of the creek, and sparsely settled by a few victims of fever and ague, its source of revenue was cordwood, boated to Buffalo for the use of the lake steamboats. Among the young men who afterward became prominent citizens of Buffalo and who at this early date gained their living by wood-chopping for the Buffalo trade, was the late George Howard, who, upwards of forty years ago, chopped cordwood in the neighborhood of Tonawanda for $12 a month.
The town of Tonawanda was formed from Buffalo, April 16, 1836. The village of Tonawanda was incorporated January 7, 1854. It then included what is now known as North Tonawanda in Niagara County. There were four wards, one of which was north of the creek. Becoming discontented by reason of the superior power wielded by the part lying in Erie County, the residents of the portion situated in Niagara County in 1857 procured the passage of an act withdrawing them from the jurisdiction of the village. That it came about that the two towns lying on either side of the creek now have their independent governments.
The great natural advantages of Tonawanda as a lumber receiving and distributing point, now considered by many as unequaled anywhere on the continent, were overlooked until 1851, when the Cleveland Commercial Company established itself at Tonawanda, purchased 500 feet of river frontage, and erected what was then the largest elevator at this end of the lake. The elevator was burned in [1861?], and the enterprise gradually lapsed, but it was the indirect source of great good to Tonawanda by attracting attention to its advantages as a lumber port.
Previous to this time a few rafts of round and square timber per annum comprised the entire transactions. Today Tonawanda is second only to Chicago as the lumber port of the world, but it was not until 1870 that the lumber trade here began to assume these large proportions. John McGraw, whose daughter, the late Jennie McGraw, married Prof. Fiske of Cornell University, was the first man to extensively open up the lumber business at Tonawanda.
Mr. William H. Gratwick of the firm of Gratwick, Smith & Fryer tells an interesting story of one of the first lumber ventures at Tonawanda. About the year 1863?, when the freight on lumber was $7 or $8 a thousand, his firm, being unable to stand such a high rate of transportation, resorted to the novel plan of building an immense raft. It contained 3,000,000 feet of lumber, or an amount equal to the capacity of about twenty canal boats. The raft was successfully towed from Bay City, Michigan, to Tonawanda, occupying about two weeks in the passage. On its arrival at Tonawanda its immense size drew people from near and far to see it. Mr. Gratwick, who was responsible for the safe landing of this 3,000,000 feet of Michigan lumber, advertised for helpers and secured 100 men.
The raft was under water to the depth of many feet, and, foreseeing that the hardest part of the work would be towards the end, when it came to landing and piling the muddy lumber on the bottom, he not only offered good wages but a bonus to every man who stayed with him until the job was done. In this way, although there was some grumbling, the lumber was, in brief time, all neatly sorted and piled in the company’s yard. This enterprise was so unique that it largely advertised Tonawanda’s advantages as a lumber port.
The lumber receipts by lake and rail of the port of Tonawanda for 1888 were 918,000,000 feet, or an amount which, if piled twelve feet high, would have extended fifty-five miles. The receipts of lumber by lake for the first three months of the present season, May, June, and July, which are the heaviest months, foot up the total of 259,068,000 feet, and the indications are that the receipts of the present season will equal the astounding figures of last year.
The following is a complete enumeration of the lumber firms doing business at Tonawanda:
A. Weston & Son.
One of the largest lumber firms is that of A. Weston & Son. The members of the firm are Alijah Weston of Painted Post, N. Y., and James Douglas Weston of Tonawanda, who is the manager. This firm does a business of from a million and a half to two million dollars a year. It handles from 60,000,000 to 65,000,000 feet of lumber a year, besides a large amount of round timber, shingles, and laths. This vast amount of business requires five yards, comprising about twenty-five acres of land and having about one mile of dock front, and a large planing mill. The firm handles the entire cut of the three mills owned and operated at Manistique, Mich., and controlled by the senior member of the firm. The firm of A. Weston & Son has standing timber enough to last twenty...
Mr. Abijah Weston is also interested in and controls the following firms which he founded:
Bronson, Weston & Co., Ottawa, Ont.
J. W. Dunham & Co., Albany, N. Y.
For, Weston & Co., Painted Post, N. Y.
Weston, Dean & Aldrich, Gouverneur, N. Y.
Weston Engine Co., Painted Post, N. Y.
Weston Bros., Oswego, N. Y.
Weston, Moses & Co., Portville, N. Y.
Bronson, Weston, Dunham & Co., Burlington, Vt.
The round timber handled is from Alger, Smith & Co., of Detroit. Mr. Alger of the firm is the well-known ex-governor of Michigan with whom Mr. Weston is also associated in various other business enterprises. A. Weston & Son ship their lumber on their own barges from Michigan, and their yards and planing mill at Tonawanda give employment to from 150 to 175 men. The firm's payroll is from $1,250 to $1,500 a week. Besides their own planing mill, the firm in order to fill its contracts has the use of others during the present season.
Gratwick, Smith & Fryer.
This house was established in 1862. The officers of the company and their places of residence are: William H. Gratwick, president, Robert Livingstone Fryer, vice-president, Buffalo, N. Y.; Edward Smith, Detroit, Mich., secretary and treasurer; C. J. Fillmore, general manager. The main office is at Tonawanda. The branch offices are at Detroit, Oscoda, Otsego Lake, Mich., and Albany. The establishments of the firm are:
THE SAW MILLS
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YARDS
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The firm has a planing mill at Tonawanda, from which port and Albany all the lumber is sold. The firm’s lumber yards and planing mill at Tonawanda give employment to about 150 men. The company has about 300,000,000 feet of standing timber in Michigan, and handles from 60,000,000 to 65,000,000 feet of lumber annually from Tonawanda. It ships largely by canal and operates its own logging railroad in Michigan. The lumber is transported on the firm’s own boats from Michigan. Seventy-five million barrels of salt are annually manufactured by the firm at Oscoda. The amount of standing timber owned by this firm in Michigan is such that if it continues to cut 65,000,000 feet a year, it has a twenty years’ stock for its mills. The policy is to buy each year nearly as much standing timber as it cuts, thus keeping its base of supplies good. A distinctive feature of the firm’s business is that the 60,000,000 feet of timber annually taken from its own forests is manufactured into lumber in its own sawmills, freighted on its own vessels, and handled entirely in its own yards and planing mills, and finally put into the boats of its own customers, the retail dealers, without the aid of middle men. The firm’s fleet of six barges represents a capital of $300,000 and a carrying capacity per trip of 1,800,000 feet.
A. M. Dodge & Co.
The firm of A. M. Dodge & Co., which began doing business at Tonawanda in 1888, is composed of Arthur M. Dodge of New York and Henry A. Crane of Buffalo. The firm has three large yards in Tonawanda and North Tonawanda and a planing mill in North Tonawanda. It has a dockage fronting on Niagara river and Tonawanda creek aggregating one mile, giving good facilities for handling, as it does, about 65,000,000 feet per annum. It has a storage capacity of 30,000,000 feet.
The large and conveniently equipped planing mill of this firm is conceded to be one of the finest in the east and has a capacity of 200,000 feet a day. It is supplied with all the most modern machinery and latest approved devices for protection against fire, the Grinnell automatic sprinkler having been recently introduced for additional protection.
The firm employs in its mill and yards at Tonawanda about 150 men. While the main office is at Tonawanda, there is also a New York office. The firm is largely interested in timber lands in Canada and Wisconsin. Mr. Dodge is president of the Georgian Bay Consolidated Lumber Company. This is conceded to be the largest lumber manufacturing company in this country. It has seven sawmills at different points on the Georgian bay and timber lands covering over 400 square miles, the product of which is largely handled through Tonawanda. Mr. Crane is president of the Penokee Lumber Company, which owns considerable timber lands on the Penokee range in Ashland county, Wis. The main office of this company will also be in Tonawanda. The company was organized by a syndicate of gentlemen owning large tracts of fine timbered lands in Wisconsin, including the range formerly owned by Cornell University. It is expected another season to bring the product of the Wisconsin mills to Tonawanda.
Other Establishments.
The firm of Smith, Fasset & Co. owns in Tonawanda, or White’s Island, a tract of less than 18 acres. They control some 1,500 feet of water front, about one-third of which is docked and either leased by themselves or rented. They employ fifty men, and their payroll is $450 a week. About 20,000,000 feet of lumber a year are handled by this firm, whose market extends as far east as Boston and Portland, and south to Washington.
The Tonawanda Lumber Company employs fifty men, and its payroll is $500 a week. The firm handles about 15,000,000 feet of lumber a year and has smaller timber land in Michigan and Canada.
F. Hollenbeck’s is one of the oldest lumber and timber houses in North Tonawanda. Mr. Hollenbeck, who lives at East Saginaw, employs some forty men in his yard and has a payroll of $350 a week. He handles about 7,500,000 feet of oak and 2,000,000 of pine every season, shipping principally to the eastern states, and making a specialty of selected oak building materials for railroads.
Another prosperous lumber firm is that of I. A. Keeley & Co. This firm, which is a recent and valuable addition to the number of Tonawanda lumber firms, confines its business chiefly to hard wood. The establishment of a hard wood lumber yard in Tonawanda supplies a long-felt want.
The firm of Hollister Brothers employs seventy men and handles annually about 25,000,000 feet of lumber. It does both a wholesale and retail business, having a planing mill at Tonawanda and a yard in Rochester.
The Eastern Lumber Company employs upwards of seventy-five men and handles from 15,000,000 to 18,000,000 feet of rough lumber a year. All the stockholders in the South Branch Lumber Company of Chicago are included in this firm, as well as many others. So far as cleanliness, correctness, and evenness of details in arranging lumber are concerned, this firm is said to have the best yard property in Tonawanda.
Messrs. Shepard and Morse are a Boston firm having a branch office in Tonawanda. They have saw mills at Grosse Ile, East Saginaw, Mich., and at Buckingham, Canada. They handle 15,000,000 feet of pine lumber annually at Tonawanda.
The W. H. Sawyer Lumber Company employs ninety hands and handles from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 feet of rough pine a year. This is another large firm, comparatively a new comer to Tonawanda. Only a branch of the business of this company is at Tonawanda. Its main office is in Boston, whence it ships largely to South America and the West Indies.
The firm of J. & B. Crockin completes the list of lumber dealers. A part of this firm’s property was recently burned; few of the smaller firms own the land on which their lumber is piled. Most of them rent it.
Other Forms of Business.
The receivers and forwarders of lumber at Tonawanda, Cowper & Gregory, Fassett & Bellinger and F. W. Scribner, have a great extent of dockage. The largest cargo ever carried by a lumber barge was unloaded last August at the dock of one of these commission dealers, Mr. F. W. Scribner. The barge, the Washington, carried 2,400,000 feet of lumber, for which she received $1.50 a thousand, or $3,750 for the cargo. The insurance on the cargo was $15,000, the largest marine insurance ever placed on a load of lumber.
The industry of Tonawanda is by no means confined to her lumber yards. She has a box factory, a pipe mill, engine and boiler works, a foundry, and a veterinary hospital.
One of the most interesting manufacturing interests of Tonawanda, and one of the longest established (1857), is that of Wyckoff water-pipes and steam-pipe casting by Ayrant Brothers & Co. Common rough pump logs were used to convey water as early as the sixteenth century. In 1857 some of these pipes were taken up and removed from before the houses in Piccadilly extending from the Duke of Devonshire's to Clarges street, after having been there 249 years. While it was found that there is nothing so pure and healthful as wood for conducting water and also that if filled with water the decay of the timber was prevented on the inside, the fact that in some soils these pipes would rot on the outside and that they were not of sufficient strength for practical use in works where water was thrown directly from hydrants in cases of fire rendered them untrustworthy as first-class water mains. To overcome these deficiencies the Wyckoff pipe is banded with heavy hoop iron, spirally wound, pressed on tightly and passed through a preparation of cement, thus giving it a coat under as well as over the band. It is an exceedingly interesting process to watch. Ordinary white pine logs in regular eight-foot lengths are cut at the company’s logging camp at Salamanca. A log is drawn from the creek by means of a chain operated by machinery, bored the required size and the outer surface removed. The log is then made to receive when dry the iron coating. All the outside waste is used for shingles.
Ayraut Bros. & Co. give employment to some fifty families at their works, covering about four acres of ground.
The Buffalo Pressed Brick company of Tonawanda makes 1,000,000 bricks a year and employs fifty men. Its payroll is about $450 a week. The company owns about eighty-two acres of clay sand in Tonawanda.
Still another industry is the sash, door and blind factory of J. F. Parkes & Son. Its output is $50,000 a year.
Messrs. Gombert & Thompson are the leading contractors for building in Tonawanda.
F. H. Barnes's box factory on White's—or Tonawanda—Island is one of the newest industries of Tonawanda, and has no equal of its kind in the world. The building is 200 feet long by 75 feet in width, with two floors, on which are eight planers and eight saws. It has been running about six months. It has orders ahead that will use up 300 car loads of shooks. It has an engine of 250-horse power and a capacity for turning out 25,000 box shooks or 150,000 feet of lumber a day. There are from 110 to 150 men employed at it. This factory makes all sizes of boxes for a great variety of purposes. They are shipped ready to be set up and are nailed together by machinery in the large establishments using them.
Mention should also be made, among the manufacturers, of C. C. McDonald & Son's flour mill. Its capacity is about 250 barrels of flour per day.
Another flourishing manufactory is that of Stevens & McIntyre, carriage makers.
A word should be said of the Tonawanda horse infirmary. Dr. H. S. Wende's infirmary occupies a commodious two-story frame building comfortably fitted up for the care of sick horses. Dr. Wende is one of a family of eight sons, seven of whom are physicians.
Reference has already been made in the COURSES to the new State Bank building of Tonawanda, which entered its new premises August 1. Erected at a cost of $25,000 on a piece of land valued at about $15,000, it is the finest building in Tonawanda and one of the finest for its purposes in western New York. Buffalo herself has no bank building more conveniently or elegantly fitted up. It is brick, with gray stone trimmings, facing Webster street, its side lying along the creek. The entrance is flanked with polished granite pillars. The capital stock of the State Bank is $100,000, the surplus stock $25,000.
Opposite the State Bank across the creek, the foundations of the Lumber Exchange Bank building have been laid. Work will be continued on this building next spring, which, when completed, will be a finer structure than the State Bank's.
The Tonawanda post office ranks as second class. Its postal receipts for the last fiscal year were $9,000. Its money orders during the last fiscal year amounted to $67,000. One item alone, that of Dr. Harold D. Hayes, mails from 1,500 to 2,000 circulars and from 300 to 500 letters daily.
Board of Trade.
Tonawanda has her board of trade, which assists and encourages all who desire to establish themselves in business there. It lends a hospitable hand to newcomers having important enterprises in view, such as will develop Tonawanda as a commercial center. Tonawanda has been spoken of as particularly adapted to the grain traffic. Although there are many desirable sites for elevators, and the landowners and citizens generally stand ready to offer inducements to such as will start the business there, it is not probable the grain trade will ever be diverted from Buffalo.
Real Estate.
Since 1870 there has been a slow but steady advance in the price of real estate at Tonawanda. This advance does not represent a boom but an honest growth of the town, the land being in actual demand by settlers. Land which up to 1872 sold for $100 an acre now brings $1,000. A tract of less than an acre, 50 feet by 80, bounded by Fort, Tremont, and Tremont Streets, was lately sold for $4,000. In 1870, this same piece of land, which is said to have been sold for less than its actual value, could have been bought at the rate of $30 an acre. Syndicates are opening up much valuable land which has hitherto lain idle. but is now being divided into building lots and selling briskly to working men at prices ranging from $100 to $300.
Tonawanda’s population is estimated at from 10,000 to 12,000—conservative estimates rate it at the former figure—and at least 4,000 of which represents the growth of the past five years. Each division of the town has its own educational department, besides the Catholic and Lutheran schools in the southern division. There are twelve churches, fourteen physicians, four dentists, and five lawyers.
The stevedores and the lumber pilers and handlers with their stout leather aprons are picturesque figures on the lumber docks at any hour of the day. The ordinary handlers and pilers earn $1.50 a day. The stevedores, who unload barges and load canal boats, earn $4 a day. It is said that fully 3,000 of Tonawanda’s population are lumber hands. During the summer season at about noon a procession of tidy-looking white-aproned women is daily seen passing along the streets in the direction of the lumber yard. Each woman carries a shining tin pail. They use this when carrying hot dinners to the lumber hands on the docks. It is somewhat surprising that a town having such heavy business interests as Tonawanda should have no paved streets. In the wet season the muddy highways do not add to its attractions as a place of residence. Tonawanda is said to have a waterworks system and a fire department that are “perfect.”