Missouri Lumber and Mining Company, Photographs, 1906-1916 (C3875)

2 folders

DONOR INFORMATION

The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company Photographs were donated to the State Historical Society on 28 June 1982 by Thelma S. McManus (Accession No. 2426).

INSTITUTIONAL SKETCH

The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company was organized in September 1880 when a handful of Pennsylvania investors bought 110,000 acres of virgin timber land in the Missouri Ozarks with the intent of expanding their interests in the nation's lumber industry. Beginning with one mill, owned by stockholder and general manager John Barber White, the company quickly became the world's largest producer of finished lumber, producing 220,000 board feet per day in 1900.

Missouri Lumber and Mining was one of America's first truly modern industrial plants, owning not only the lands from which it harvested its raw materials, but also many of the railroad lines that hauled logs from the forest to the company headquarters at Grandin, Missouri, where mills, machine shops, and lumber yards produced the wood products America was clamoring for. In 1897 Missouri Lumber and Mining combined with three other Missouri lumber companies to establish the Missouri Lumber and Land Exchange, which acted as the sales arm of the growing company. By the turn-of-the-century Missouri Mining and Lumber was so powerful that it is said to have controlled lumber prices nation-wide, and raised prices ten times in 1899 alone.

Along with providing housing, schooling, recreation, and a "company store" for its employees, Missouri Lumber and Mining, under the direction of Dr. Alexander Johnston, also pioneered the concept of company-sponsored health care. For $1.25 a month, employees and their families were entitled to unlimited health care at the company's dispensary. This hospital-clinic was manned by a staff that eventually totalled 10 employees, including a dentist who visited once a month. But this up-to-date medical attention was not restricted to the town of Grandin. Johnston worked with the company machine shops to create two fully-equipped travelling units--small, two-roomed buildings that could be loaded and unloaded onto railroad flat cars--that acted as dispensary, operating room, examining room, and sleeping quarters for the travelling physicians who visited each camp three times a week.

In 1905 the secondary mill at Grandin burned to the ground, forcing the larger main mill to begin 24-hour-a-day operations. At this pace 90 log car loads of logs were required each day to fill the company's orders. But by the end of the century's first decade, widespread deforestation was beginning to take its toll, and in 1910 the company closed the mill at Grandin and moved its headquarters to West Eminence, Missouri. Operations continued there until 1919 when the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company ceased operations.

SCOPE AND CONTENT NOTE

This collection contains photographs taken by Dr. Harry M. Griffith, company physician for the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company, in Grandin, Missouri. Most of these pictures were taken in Spring 1907 and are of people and places in and around Grandin, associated with Missouri Lumber and Mining's operations. Folder one contains photocopied pages of Dr. Griffith's original scrapbook, with accompanying photographs numbered to the appropriate page. Folder two contains photographs that were loose and "tucked in" between various pages, in no apparent order. Many of these "loose" photos complement photographs found in folder one.

People pictured include three other doctors working for the Company at this time; a group of black railroad workers and their white overseers; loggers; and the Yale University, School of Forestry, Class of 1907, who worked for Missouri Lumber and Mining as surveyors in Spring 1907.

Other subjects include buildings in Grandin, including the sawmill and lumber yard; a logging camp made up of portable shacks hauled in on railroad flatbed cars; a log-train wreck near Grandin; Current River scenery; and the stages through which wood passes from forest timber to railroad ties.

FOLDER LIST

f. 1Scrapbook
f. 2Miscellaneous photographs

INDEX TERMS

These index terms are the subjects, people, places, etc. under which this collection is listed in all available indexes at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Columbia. If you are interested in a specific index term, please contact the reference staff.

  • Art--Preservation
  • Black railroad employees, c. 1907
  • Cannon, Joseph Gurney
  • Current River
  • Dentistry, c. 1907
  • Greer-Wilkerson Lumber Company
  • Griffith, Harry M.
  • Johnston, Alexander
  • Missouri Lumber & Mining Company, Grandin, MO
  • Missouri, Grandin, 1907
  • Railroad employees, Blacks
  • Railroads
  • Railroads, Accidents, 1907