Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,908
By This is the grave of Andrew Hammond.
Born in 1848 in Saint-Léonard, New Brusnwick, Canada, Hammond grew up a working class kid. This was timber country and he was just a young boy who needed to work, so logging it was. By the time he was 16, he was working timber camps in Maine and then down into Pennsylvania. He was adventurous so he headed out to Montana in 1867. Here, he got to know some mercantile guys and they took him in. Why cut trees your whole life when you could rise into business? That was Hammond’s thought anyway. Moreover, he could run the other side of timber operations and maybe make his fortune. He certainly succeeded at that.
Based out of Montana for the next few decades, Hammond became one of the biggest timber barons in American history, using all sorts of questionable and nefarious methods. The real way to do this was to cut deals with the railroads and in this era of epic corruption, Hammond was a happy player. In 1883, Hammond got the contract to build the Northern Pacific through Idaho and Montana and it made him a millionaire. See, as part of this, you didn’t just get money, you got land and he and his partners could sell that land or mine it or log it or do whatever they wanted with it. Plus of course they would access to their own railroad line to get the products back to the east.
So Hammond became a major player in Montana, but while there was certainly plenty of money to make in timber there, it was west of the Cascades where the real money was. Backed by the California rail baron and general scumbag Collis Huntington, he started investing heavily on the west coast in 1900, when he purchased the Samoa mill in Humboldt County, already a major redwood producer. He also invested heavily in the Douglas fir and Sitka spruce forests of Oregon and Washington. He would expand those operations and became probably the most important redwood capitalist in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Of course, he sought to acquire land any way he could, including illegally. The Timber and Stone Act of 1878 sought to regulate the selling of timber on public lands, but it was easily avoided and millions of acres were sold around the West illegally to the capitalists. That included Hammond, who bought basically all the land that is now Redwood National Park and much more than that through illegal means. Eventually, his heirs had to cede it back to the federal government once the fraud was uncovered, leading to the eventual creation of that park in 1968 and its expansion to its current borders in 1978. But to be clear, Hammond knew he was breaking the law and committing fraud and he just hired his lawyers to get beyond the law, which most of the lawmakers were cool with anyway since they were happy to take some bribes.
Hammond loathed unions deeply. He already had experience unionbusting in San Francisco at the beginning of the twentieth century, when workers shut down the ports and he couldn’t get his products to market. He took the lead in busting the seaman’s union, taking on the often impressive labor leader Andrew Furuseth and winning in the courts because the courts were total hacks of corporate America. Good thing that’s changed! Strikebreakers and injunctions were the favorite tools of Hammond, and really of every other anti-union capitalist in America during the Gilded Age.
Hammond then was a leader in the anti-union movement in the Northwest timber camps. Conditions in these camps were so epically horrible that workers started joining the Industrial Workers of the World in response. Smarter capitalists realized the score and knew that if they just fixed the living and working conditions a bit–maybe provide some mattresses and decent food and a place to bathe–that most of these workers would go away from radicalism. Hammond was not one of these smarter capitalists. He had learned early on in his career that if he placed his workers in intensively isolated places, he could control them. That was true up to a point, but this is where the IWW came into play, seeing an opportunity in the desperation of these workers. Hammond was furious about all of this Like a lot of these capitalists, he hoped that the government would use World War I as an excuse to bust unions. But he had to acquiesce to improving his camps when the government intervened in his camps and created the Spruce Production Division and the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbrermen to get out the Sitka spruce to build airplanes during World War I. He was more than happy to see Colonel Brice Disque lead the military into camps to bust unions, but he was far less happy to see the Army order and then enforce all the changes to working and living conditions that his workers had demanded for years. But the Army couldn’t work in those conditions either.
So in a sense, Hammond won here. The Army did crush the IWW. But in a sense he didn’t win, because he had to commit to immediate capital investments to his logging camps under the order of the military. Of course none of that really hurt his bottom line, but boy were he and other timber camp operators furious about this. And it’s not like he really suffered after the war either. He developed a practice of taking the trees of the Northwest, tying them together, and creating enormous rafts he would have towed through the ocean south from Astoria or other northwestern ports to San Francisco. The government finally banned this practice in the early 20s, no doubt another federal repression of his rights or whatever. But you know, logs got loose and then became serious hazards to navigation and that was one of the few things the government took seriously as regulators at this time. He basically owned most of what is today Tillamook County in Oregon. In 1927, he became massive clearcutting operations on this land to strip these giant trees for profit. This was somewhat forestalled by the three fires knows collectively as the Tillamook Burn that ripped through these lands in the 1930s, particularly the 1933 fire.
Hammond was still alive for this too. He died in 1934, at the age of 85.
Andrew Hammond is buried in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma, California.
If you would like this series to visit other Gilded Age capitalists, all my favorite people, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Leland Stanford is in Palo Alto, California and Henry Flagler is in St. Augustine, Florida. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.