PINE INVENTORY 



Relief by means of machines that would cut and trim 

 more logs, load and unload them more quickly, was the 

 obvious solution. Accordingly, a number of different 

 paper mill managements began mechanization soon 

 after we entered the war. 



There was one man, however, who had thought about 

 cutting and handling machines and even tried them out 

 before Pearl Harbor. Edward J. Gayner, III, of the 

 Brunswick Pulp and Paper Company, deserves the 

 credit due a pioneer. A businesslike man, businesslike 

 in thought, word, and deed, he studied the whys and 

 wherefores of this new development, and in orderly 

 fashion figured out that mechanization of the woods 

 operations was sane and sensible. 



"Most of the paper mills that came South during the 

 past twenty years," he told me, "were attracted by wood 

 and labor, both abundant and low-cost. Wood was cut 

 and trimmed, loaded and unloaded by hand, arduous 

 jobs all of them. There was no doubt about the low cost 

 of stumpage; that is, what we paid for wood cut on 

 another man's land. But I began to wonder if the cost 

 of getting it into the plant was really as low as we 

 liked to think. Compared with Northern or Western 

 scales, our wages were certainly not high, and yet right 

 out my office window I had a constant object lesson 

 over in the woodyard that set me to figuring. We 

 tried out a couple of crane-and-chain loading experi- 



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