52 2 FULLING 



was about 200 million dollars, one writer expressed the prevailing attitude 

 when he wrote that "bark, abundant everywhere in America, is redundant in 

 new settlements where the tanning business facilitates the destruction of the 

 forests which obstruct agriculture." 



Toward the close of the nineteenth century, however, gradual depletion 

 of the available oak and hemlock supplies in New England compelled the 

 industry to move westward and southward. Pennsylvania and West Virginia 

 then became centers of bark production. Demand waxed so great that the 

 bark of trees felled for lumber was not sufficient to satisfy the tanneries and 

 many acres of virgin hemlock were cut down for their bark alone. In 1900 

 hemlock constituted over 70 per cent (more than 1 million cords) of all 

 the tanning bark collected in the country; it was the leader then, and still 

 led in 1909, but by that year it had declined to about 65 per cent and 700,000 

 cords. 



From Pennsylvania and West Virginia the harvesting of hemlock bark 

 followed the course of the lumber industry into the Lake States, especially 

 Michigan and Wisconsin. In one year, from 1915 to 1916, production in 

 Wisconsin rose from 20,000 to 100,000 cords. By 1928, however, the harvest 

 in these two states had fallen to a 25-year high of 63,000 cords. By 1951 it 

 declined to 4,400 cords, primarily as a result of economic factors, not of scar- 

 city of material. Around 1918 there were 36 tanneries in the United States 

 using Michigan and Wisconsin hemlock; in 1952 it was still being used, but 

 in only 10 companies. At the beginning of the 1920's perhaps 10 per cent of 

 all hemlock bark used in the United States came from states other than those 

 previously mentioned and by importation from Canada, for in 1919 it was 

 estimated that over 90 per cent of the total was harvested in Maine, Massa- 

 chusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and West Virginia. 



With a growing scarcity of hemlock and oak barks in the East near the 

 close of the nineteenth century, tanners turned their attention to the virgin 

 stands of western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla and T. mertcnsiana) , with 

 10 to 12 per cent tannin in the bark, in the Pacific Northwest, and to tanbark 

 oak (Quercus densi flora = Lithocarpus densiflora), with 10 to 30 per cent 

 tannin in the bark, along the Coast Range from southwestern Oregon to 

 Santa Barbara, California. Commercial tanning had been carried on, on the 

 Pacific Coast, since the gold rush of 1849, and by 1859 there were 29 tan- 

 neries in Sonoma County alone. In the ten-year period 1881-1890, 240,000 

 cords of tanbark oak was collected in California to support the industry. By 

 1905 the figure fell to 50,000 cords. By 1920, however, after exploitation of 

 western hemlock had developed, about 2,200 tons of bark, two-thirds of it 

 hemlock, was being used annually in the tanneries of Oregon and Washington. 



In 1950 an estimate was cited to the effect that a minimum of 50,000 tons 

 of western hemlock bark was annually available for tanning extraction in 



