by Eric Rutkow
When the fire finally died and a new day dawned, those in Peshtigo who survived opened their eyes to “a scene with whose horror and ruin none were as yet fully acquainted,” according to Pernin. The charred bodies of people and animals lay everywhere. “In many cases,” wrote Stephenson, “there was nothing left of human beings other than a streak of light ashes which would scarcely have filled a thimble.” Thick, dark ash covered every surface. Almost nothing remained beyond a few stone foundations, some iron tools, and the boilers of the locomotives. A correspondent from the New York Tribune, upon visiting the village the following week, wrote: “In the glory of this Indian Summer afternoon I look out on the ghastliest clearing that ever lay before mortal eyes. The sandy streets glisten with a frightful smoothness, and calcined fragments are all that remain of imposing edifices and hundreds of peaceful homes.” As for the trees that had once filled these broad forests, in the words of Stephenson, “[W]here the forest had been, gaunt disfigured tree trunks stood like sentinels of death under the low-hanging pall of smoke.” In total, the fire had destroyed 1,280,000 acres, roughly 2,000 square miles, an area 33 percent larger than Rhode Island.
News of the disaster was slow to reach the outside world. Earlier in the summer fires had destroyed the telegraph poles that connected the lumber settlements to Chicago. The morning after the blaze, Stephenson sent an emissary to the city of Green Bay, where telegraph lines still functioned, to issue a distress message to Governor Lucius Fairchild. This initial message arrived on the morning of October 10, two days after the fire began.
Fairchild tried to disseminate the news quickly, but the world’s attention was already focused on a different disaster: The same night that Peshtigo burned, an unrelated fire swept through Chicago, leaving much of the city in ashes. News outlets focused primarily on the “Great Chicago Fire,” which destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of property overnight and eviscerated the center of the entire midwestern economy. The magnitude of this story left little news space available for the tragedy just to the north.
In the weeks following the Peshtigo firestorm, survivors began the arduous task of counting the dead. The numbers seemed to climb indefinitely. Peshtigo, by far the heaviest hit, conservatively claimed six hundred victims. The total number, given the hundreds of transient laborers passing through the town, might have been much higher. No other towns sustained more than one hundred casualties, but several reported more than fifty deaths, and hundreds of other people perished in isolated locations scattered throughout the forest: fur trappers, homesteaders, lumberjacks, timber surveyors. The final death toll stood somewhere between eleven hundred and twelve hundred people, roughly five times greater than that of the Great Chicago Fire, making Peshtigo the deadliest forest blaze in the history of the nation, if not the world. Even into the twentieth century, reports still surfaced occasionally of charred bodies discovered in nearby swamps and bogs.
The town of Peshtigo had been demolished but was not defeated. Governor Fairchild came to the aid of the survivors and broadcast appeals for donations. Contributions poured in from all over the state, the nation, and even overseas, amounting to $166,789 in total. The federal government also provided surplus army supplies: 4,000 woolen blankets, 1,500 pairs of trousers and overcoats, 100 wagons, and thousands of rations of foodstuffs. The railroad company completed the line from Chicago, though only after threat of lawsuit over damages—Stephenson, like many, argued that “the fire [was] directly due to the carelessness of the contractors.” William Butler Ogden, who had lost approximately $3 million in the twin fires of October 8, ordered that his woodenware factory be rebuilt. Others followed his lead and the local economy slowly recovered. When the new governor of Wisconsin visited the town in 1873, he noted: “I was pleased to find that the majority of the survivors had returned to their clearings; many had raised fair crops, and were hopeful of the future. I found nearly all very grateful for the relief that had been extended to them, but for which, they declared, they could not have survived.”
Incredibly, the Peshtigo tragedy had almost no impact on the practices of the lumber industry or the way that new settlers approached life in the forests. In the ensuing decades, as the rate of industrial logging increased, the problem of forest fires actually worsened throughout the country. Wisconsin alone suffered major fires in 1880, 1891, 1894, 1897, 1908, 1910, 1923, 1931, and 1936. Losing half a million acres in a year was almost commonplace. Many considered any year that lost fewer than one hundred thousand acres to be a relative success. The demand for trees outpaced the means of arresting their greatest threat, and man-made fires would remain the main scourge of the nation’s forests for another eighty years.
From Rags to Riches
AS DEPENDENT AS Americans had become on the wood from their trees, at the time of the Peshtigo Fire in 1871 they were only using it for timber and fuel. A revolution, however, was brewing. Trees, the nation was about to discover, could provide not only wood but wood pulp, the raw material for cheap paper, something as important to America’s development as the railroads, if not more so.
The process of making paper is, at its most basic level, fairly straightforward. The main ingredient is cellulose, a carbohydrate that forms the chief component of all leafy green plants. Cellulose fibers are separated from the rest of the organic matter using mechanical or chemical means. The cellulose-rich pulp that remains is spread out in a thin layer along a screen, which is drained, pressed, and dried, leaving behind a solid sheet of paper. The earliest papers were made of papyrus and began to appear in roughly 1800 BCE. Over time, other fibers like cotton, flax, and linen displaced papyrus.
In America, before the late nineteenth century, virtually all paper was made from cloth rags. The process of textile manufacture reduced cotton and linen to almost a pure cellulose. Worn-out fabrics thus provided an excellent source of raw-paper fiber—the practice of calling newspapers “rags” arose from this relationship. Supplies were inherently limited, but demand remained low throughout the colonial period, for paper was a luxury good: Most of it was hand-crafted and expensive. On occasions when papermakers needed to increase their supplies, they often took to the streets in search of collections. The following advertisement appeared in the Boston News-Letter in 1769:
The BellCart will go through Boston before the End of next Month, to collect Rags for the Paper Mill at Milton, when all people that will encourage the Paper Manufactury may dispose of them. . . .
Rags are as Beauties, which concealed lie,
But when in Paper, how it charms the Eye:
Pray save Rags, new Beauties to discover,
For Paper truly, every one’s a lover:
By th’ Pen and Press such Knowledge is display’d
As wou’dn’t exist if Paper was not made.
Wisdom of Things, mysterious, divine,
Illustriously doth on Paper shine.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, several factors converged to drive up the demand for paper and rags. Populations swelled and literacy rates grew. Residents of the ever-expanding metropolitan zones wanted to read about the events of the day in their local newspapers, which increased in size and number. At the same time, the old-fashioned papermakers slowly yielded to the paper mills. These hungered insatiably for raw materials, especially as new technologies improved their efficiency: A machine appeared in 1817 that spooled paper onto a cylinder; ten years later a paper mill imported from France the fourdrinier, a device that created an endless sheet of paper.
To meet the surging demand America was purchasing 2 million pounds of foreign rags annually by 1843. This number ballooned more than twenty times in less than a generation. In 1857 alone, America imported 44,582,080 pounds of rags, primarily from distant trading partners like Alexandria (in present-day Egypt), Smyrna (in present-day Turkey), and Trieste (in present-day Italy).
The rag situation bubbled over into crisis during the Civil War. Trade restrictions and the collapse of the cotton crop p
roduced something of a rag famine, while the growth of the political bureaucracy and the proliferation of newspapers heightened the demand. “Who shall write the lyric of the great Rag Hunt of the last four years?” asked the New York Tribune in 1866, adding, “[T]imid men began to fear that a return to vellum and palimpsest was all that remained.”
The price of paper, especially newsprint, skyrocketed, and newspapers took dramatic actions to avoid bankruptcy. The New York Evening Post reduced its page dimensions by four columns. Other papers, like the New York Tribune and the Philadelphia Daily Evening Register, similarly cut back their sizes. Some papers raised prices or lowered circulation to offset their mounting supply costs. A frustrated editor of the New England Farmer commented, “Paper is too high. These high prices operate as a tax upon education. They greatly abridge the circulation of books, newspapers and letter-writing.”
Desperate publishers and paper mill owners began searching frantically for rag substitutes to help lower the costs of production. They experimented with a dizzying array of potential replacements from across the plant kingdom: agave of Cuba, bamboo, corn husks, esparto grass, forest leaves, hemp, hops, jute, white moss from Scandinavia, yucca, and countless others. Many of these had merit, but none matched rags for quality nor offered a supply stream sufficient to meet demand and curtail the price spiral. As an article in the Tribune lamented, “Industry and science had found an ingenious mechanism capable of printing all the books of the world over again—where was the paper?”
Those searching for a rag replacement also auditioned innumerable types of trees. The Boston Journal managed to print one 1863 edition on basswood, and other isolated attempts occurred during the 1850s and 1860s. The problem with trees was the same one that doomed all the other substitutes: papermakers lacked cost-effective technologies to separate the cellulose from the extraneous materials. The situation, however, was about to change.
In the 1850s a German inventor had discovered a simple process to convert wood into pulp. His machine used an iron weight to force a piece of wood against a spinning grindstone. A stream of water ran constantly at the point where the wood met the stone, and it carried the resulting pulp away and onto a series of sieves and rollers. The final product was a sheet of thick, coarse drawing paper. In 1866, two American brothers, who had acquired the patent rights, brought this novel machine to Curtisville, Massachusetts. They ground their first batch of pulp in early March 1867, and a nearby paper mill produced a finished product several days later.
A second wood-pulp process, known as soda pulp, was evolving contemporaneously. The inventor, Hugh Burgess, was an Englishman, and his technique employed a bath of alkalis (caustic soda) to separate out the fibers from the wood. This soda pulp process produced stronger, more uniform paper than groundwood pulp. Burgess took out an American patent and began production at Manayunk, Pennsylvania, in 1854. Output remained meager for the better part of a decade, but it began to rise following the formation of the American Wood Paper Company in 1863. One reporter who visited the works in 1866 wrote, “[I]f [the owners] succeed in making paper as perfect and useful as that upon which I am now writing (and which came from their mill), they will revolutionize the art of paper-making, and greatly lessen the cost of knowledge.”
The early manufacturers of both forms of wood pulp almost universally favored poplar, a tree with few commercial uses up to that point. “Poplar wood,” wrote a reporter in 1868, “is by nature so pure and white that no chemicals or bleaches are required to make a fit material for manufacturing printing paper.” The wood’s suitability, however, did not translate to availability, since no distribution network existed to ship it from the forests to the pulp manufacturers. In 1866, for example, the Philadelphia Inquirer appealed directly to its readership for supplies: “Poplar wood wanted, from 100 to 10,000 cords of White Poplar Wanted, to be delivered at The Philadelphia ‘Inquirer’ Paper Mills and Wood Pulp Works.” During the industry’s formative years, it relied largely on local farmers cutting poplar trees from their woodlots and delivering them to nearby railroads. The distribution system formalized over time, especially as growing demand outstripped local supplies. Occasionally, poplar lumber even followed pines downriver during the springtime log drives.
The wood-pulp industry expanded throughout the 1870s, and major newspapers began to embrace the new product. The New York World first featured wood-pulp paper in 1870. The Providence Journal and Brooklyn Eagle followed a year later. The New York Times first tried wood-pulp stock in late August 1873, and by year-end they had changed over completely. In 1877, an article noted, “In our own country the use of wood in making paper has increased, so that almost all paper for newspapers is one-half wood pulp.” This assertion was somewhat premature, but only by a few years. Nearly every large-circulation paper had shifted to wood pulp by 1882, avoiding the apocalyptic predictions of a worldwide rag shortage.
The main appeal of wood-pulp paper was not its quality—which was far inferior to that of rag paper—but its price. At the end of the Civil War, newsprint paper sold for between thirteen or fourteen cents per pound on average. The earliest wood-pulp papers, in contrast, cost around eight cents per pound, and this price dropped steadily thanks to increased competition, improved technologies, and economies of scale. At one point, mills offered paper for an astonishing one cent per pound. These decreases were even more remarkable in light of the period’s inflation. In 1894, a newspaper article noted,
With the rapidly increasing output, prices have as rapidly declined, until to-day a grade of newsprint paper worth 25 years ago, 13 cents or 14 cents per pound, is now sold at 2½ to 3 cents—a decline in price unequalled in the history of any other industry. This enormous decrease in the cost of paper is due especially to the introduction of wood as paper stock. To-day it is the principal material used in the manufacture of paper for all but the highest grades of book and writing paper.
This unprecedented drop in paper prices eventually resulted in cheaper periodicals. Newspapers that had sold for four, then five, then six cents in the 1860s and 1870s reversed the trend in the two decades that followed. The New York Herald dropped from four cents to three in 1876, and shaved another penny off the price in 1883. The New York World, which had cost five cents in 1866, sold for two cents in 1882, even though it doubled its size that same year.
The advent of cheap wood-pulp paper changed not only the cost of periodicals but the structure of the entire newspaper industry. Historically, many publishers had opposed circulation increases on the theory that increased paper consumption made such moves unprofitable. This attitude began to change when Joseph Pulitzer purchased the New York World in 1883. He introduced features designed to drive up readership: large headlines, comic strips, strong editorials, and sensational journalism. Buoyed by a two-cent price tag, the paper expanded its circulation from 20,000 to 250,000 in four years and generated enormous profits thanks to the reduced production costs that wood pulp provided. Other publishers followed Pulitzer’s example, and soon every major city had mass-circulating penny papers—between 1880 and 1890 the total amount of paper used by American newspapers rose from 106,874,792 pounds to 670,929,492 pounds. This new business model facilitated the rise of newspaper titans like Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
The shift to wood pulp, as much as any single economic, political, or social phenomenon, helped to democratize information in the late nineteenth century. Inexpensive periodicals allowed information to flow more freely, contributing to a more informed body politic. Cheap books encouraged literacy. And low-cost paper allowed all classes of people to write one another letters for the first time. One newspaperman wrote in 1881: “The invention of wood pulp . . . has brought good books, good newspapers, and writing paper within the means of thousands of common people who could never have afforded such luxuries had rags remained the only available material for papers of good quality.” As another reporter, reflecting on America’s newfound appreciation for paper, observed in 1894: �
�Some philosopher has said that the civilization and property of a country may be measured by its consumption of paper.”
The more Americans grew accustomed to cheap paper, the more they clamored to see it used everywhere, and a veritable paper craze emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. In Atlanta, promoters constructed a store made entirely from paper. The ceiling of New York’s state assembly chamber was made of paper. A journalist wrote in 1891:
At first, wood pulp was used entirely in the manufacture of newspapers, but now it is employed for manifold purposes. Its use bids fair to be large for mouldings, and it is being made into barrels, tubs, pails, washboards, water pipes, doors, caskets, carriage bodies, floor coverings and furniture, imitations of leather cloth and silk have been made from it. . . . Thus we see the uses to which wood pulp can be put are almost unlimited.
The wood-pulp industry, meanwhile, had made great strides from its modest beginnings in the 1860s. Daily output had grown from the 13 tons that the American Wood Paper Company produced in 1866 to 100 tons in 1877, 410 tons in 1884, and 2,000 in 1891. By the mid-1880s, the booming industry had run through all the economical sources of poplar, and companies began to shift toward spruce and fir, which grew abundantly throughout the Northeast, often on lands that the lumber industry had already cleared of white pines. Pulp manufacturers constructed massive factories in the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, and New York, and began to purchase enormous tracts of timber throughout these states. Fifty thousand people were working in the industry at the turn of the century.
Like the lumber and newspaper businesses, the wood-pulp industry quickly started to consolidate. Smaller firms could not compete with the increasingly complex enterprises that invested enormous amounts of capital in machinery and timberlands. And as newspapers grew in size, they sought out these larger firms, whose massive reserves guaranteed timely supply. Congress hastened this trend toward consolidation with the 1897 passage of the Dingley Tariff, which placed a duty on imported Canadian wood pulp, knocking out the only serious competition to the American firms.