Historic Louisiana

CHAPTER V
MAKING A LIVING: INDUSTRY
Large-scale industry spurred Louisiana’s growth in wealth and population in the twentieth
century. The great industries have been timber, oil and gas, chemicals, sulphur, and shipbuilding.
The capital and the ownership of these industries have generally come from outside the state of
Louisiana. The large Louisiana chemical industry replaced the nineteenth century sugar industry
as the primary Mississippi River landowner. Oil, gas, sulphur, and abundant fresh water has
made Louisiana a major force in the United States chemical industry. An increasing percentage
of Louisiana workers are employed by national firms, and an increasing percentage work in
service industries.
Timber was the first major export industry of Louisiana. Despite its ups and down over the past
three centuries, today timber alone accounts for half of the value of Louisiana’s agricultural
products. Frenchmen and Acadians began lumbering from the earliest days. Cypress was
recognized at an early date as a unique wood for shipbuilding, because it was extremely light and
totally resistant to worms. The French, Spanish, and later, the United States reserved the largest
trees to serve as masts and spars on their military sailing ships. Louisiana barrel staves and boxes
became of prime importance to the Caribbean sugar islands that were devoid of wood for the
casking of molasses and sugar. Logging grew in the 1780s as two new groups entered the market.
The partnership of Louis Judice, the Acadian coast commandant; Joseph Landry, a Lafourche
militia officer; and Laurent Sigur purchased trees for sale to the Spanish Royal Navy at Havana.
Pierre Belly of Iberville Parish led another partnership from the 1780s and assembled a group of
investors “to supply ...masts and spars to the King....”
Within Louisiana, New Orleans was the largest market for timber. In 1773, builder Alexander
Latil, a resident of Bayou Road, purchased supplies for wooden flooring in New Orleans houses.
The following year he entered into a partnership with Maurice Conway to purchase the Houmas
Indian site for its lumbering possibilities.
The introduction of steam-powered sawmills at the beginning of the nineteenth century spurred
the timber industry, but even by 1880 hardly a tenth of Louisiana’s first growth timber had been
harvested. One reason was that most of Louisiana’s land belonged to the Federal Government as a
result of the Louisiana Purchase. But in 1849, Congress enacted the Swampland Act. By this act
the United States gave ten million Louisiana acres (one third of the entire state) to the State
government. This “swampland” was to be sold and the proceeds used to build levees. Civil War
and Reconstruction intervened, but finally the State government began transferring its swamplands
to local levee boards. Valuable cypress forests often covered the swamplands. The swamplands
often covered salt domes and oil and gas deposits.
With the final clearing of the large forests in the upper midwest in the 1880s, northern
lumbermen turned to Louisiana. They found pliable levee boards anxious to make a deal in return
for cash to build levees. Until the 1880s, men known as “swampers” felled the cypress trees in the
winter and early spring in anticipation of the rise in the Mississippi River that flooded the swamps.
The logs would then be floated out to the waiting sawmills. Northern investors turned the
Louisiana industry from a handcraft to an industrial enterprise. In 1888, Joseph Rathborne
founded the Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company. He came to the United States soon after the Civil
War and settled in Chicago, where he started in the lumber business with Kelley, Wood & Co.
handling white pine. Rathborne later bought out Wood and the firm became Kelley, Rathborne &
Co., operating two lumberyards. After twenty years Rathborne formed his own firm to handle
white pine and the newly discovered Louisiana cypress. Two years later he moved down to New
Orleans and leased the land where the Harvey Canal joined the Mississippi River. He introduced
✧
The Exxon refinery (once Standard Oil) in
Baton Rouge is a large pipeline hub,
bringing oil and gas from the Louisiana
fields in the marsh to the west.
CHAPTER V
53