Marshfield May Queen Ruth I and Her Court, 1936 OHS SIF 723

The lumber industry, buoyed by heavy orders and high prices during World War I, weathered the postwar economic decline, and remained the region’s predominant industry. By 1929 Northwest sawmills were cutting 11.7 billion board feet of lumber a year and supporting a million jobs. Then the crash of 1929 sent the nation’s economy into free fall. Not only timber, but fishing, farming, and mining — all the extractive industries that were the backbone of the coastal economy — suffered from plummeting markets as the nationwide malaise curtailed industrial production and domestic spending.

Between 1929 and 1932 lumber exports were cut in half. The salmon pack declined by 120 million pounds. Employment in production industries dropped by more than one-third: for every one hundred Oregon workers who had been employed in 1929, there were sixty-three in 1933.

The Oregon coast, and indeed the whole state, now was a place of idled mills, mines, and factories, unemployed workers, and families in need. Some Oregonians left to seek their fortunes elsewhere even as refugees streamed in from the Dust Bowl, where the suffering was even more dire. An estimated ten thousand families came to the Northwest from the parched Great Plains in 1936. But for every three who came to Oregon, two left.

Tax delinquencies soared. By 1936, Oregon landowners were delinquent on $40 million in taxes. Huge acreages of timberlands reverted to counties as their owners simply walked away rather than pay the taxes. The question of what to do with these lands set up a sequence of events that would propel the state of Oregon into the land and timber business in 1948, when Oregon passed a controversial bond issue to reforest the notorious Tillamook Burn.

© Gail Wells, 2006.

Themes: Social Relations,Politics and Government,Economics

Regions: Oregon Coast

Date: 1929-1945

Author: Gail Wells

Summary:

When the crash of 1929 sent the nation’s economy into free fall, the extractive industries that were the backbone of the coastal economy suffered as the nationwide malaise curtailed industrial production and domestic spending.