“A grim and costly business” the mechanization, modernization, and decline of pulpwood logging in central Newfoundland

Abstract

Between 1907 and 1927 the seasonal foray into the “lumberwoods” to harvest pulpwood for the Grand Falls and Corner Brook newsprint mills became an entrenched part of outport life in many Newfoundland communities. After World War Two, stabilized and growing markets for newsprint meant that thousands of rural Newfoundland men found work harvesting and delivering pulpwood. Beginning in the 1950s, mechanization and modernization dramatically reduced the labour requirements of Newfoundland’s pulpwood industry, creating a “corps of professional loggers” that constituted a fraction of the workers employed previously. In the 1950s, the Grand Falls mill’s importance to the province’s economy meant that few imagined that it would ever close. However, when the mill closure came in 2009 it did not have a catastrophic impact on the economy of central Newfoundland. This was due to a fifty-year decline in the economic importance of the pulp and paper, and pulpwood industry in Newfoundland. By 2009 more jobs had been lost in the preceding four decades than were lost by the complete closure of the mill. Had the closure of the mill occurred forty or fifty years previous, because of the dependence on the pulp and paper industry and the much larger number of jobs at stake, the region would have been economically devastated. The long-term impacts of mechanization and modernization meant that the deindustrialization of central Newfoundland was a slow process with an abrupt ending. For those loggers that remained after the mechanization efforts of the 1950s and 1960s, the process of mechanization did not stop, nor did the challenges faced in supplying the Grand Falls pulp and paper mill with wood. Using archival materials, company newsletters, local newspapers, and oral history, this thesis examines central Newfoundland’s loggers, the changing nature of their work, and how mechanization dramatically reduced their numbers ultimately diminishing the economic importance of the pulpwood harvest to the provincial economy.