Archives West Finding Aid

Andrew Jackson Pope and Captain William Talbot, both from families who owned sawmills in Maine, founded the Pope & Talbot Company shortly after they arrived in San Francisco in 1849. The pair had come to gold rush San Francisco to sell lumber that had been cut on the East Coast and shipped around Cape Horn. It soon became evident, however, that transportation costs severely cut into the profits of this venture. They thus decided to build a sawmill at Port Gamble. When the mill opened in 1853, it was only the fourth mill on Puget Sound. Pope & Talbot created a subsidiary, the Puget Mill Company, to run the mill.

Although its mill was not as large as Captain William Renton’s Port Blakely mill, the Puget Mill Company still grew to be the most profitable lumber firm on the Sound. The company built another mill at Port Gamble in 1856, bought additional mills at Utsalady in 1877 and at Port Ludlow in 1878, and acquired several sailing ships throughout the nineteenth century. The Pope & Talbot companies owed a great deal of their prosperity to their expert administration. William Talbot had wisely picked the talented Cyrus Walker and Edwin Ames to manage operations on Puget Sound (see the guide to the Edwin G. Ames papers for more detail). Talbot also adopted a modern organizational structure with many specialized subsidiaries and instituted modern accounting procedures well before any other firm in the industry.

Pope & Talbot was able to weather depressions because of its owners’ policy of borrowing money only from family members and because of the company’s diverse market base. Pope & Talbot was more adventurous and more successful than other companies trying to enter foreign markets. For many years the company had a virtual monopoly on the lumber trade with Hawaii. In addition, Talbot and Pope built good relations with lumber yards throughout California. When competition in California became too fierce, Pope & Talbot took the leading role in organizing the Pacific Pine Lumber Company, a cooperative effort to fix prices, set production quotas, and divide up the lucrative California market. Pacific Pine lasted only from 1886 to 1897 and never functioned particularly well as a cartel, but it still postponed the time when Pope & Talbot lost its strong position in the California market.

The completion of the Northern Pacific line to Tacoma in 1887 did not immediately impact Pope & Talbot. In the 1890s, however, when railroad rates fell and when lumbermen from the Great Lakes states moved into the Northwest, Pope & Talbot saw its profits shrink. Talbot had selected the company’s mill sites because of their excellent harbors. Unfortunately, this left the Pope & Talbot mills, all located on the west side of Puget Sound, miles from a major rail line and thus unable to compete in the vast markets east of the Cascades. The company also faced increasing competition in its overseas markets.

Pope & Talbot began hiring its own logging crews and cutting its own land to avoid buying high-priced logs from independent companies in the early twentieth century. This policy, coupled with sales of logged-off lands between Seattle and Everett, kept the company afloat but never really overcame the advantages held by the newer, rail-oriented mills. The Talbot and Pope families sold their companies to the Charles McCormick Lumber Company in 1925. McCormick quickly ran into financial trouble, causing the Talbot and Pope families to resume management in 1929. When McCormick failed to meet his payments, Pope & Talbot re-acquired its former holdings in 1938.

The rebirth of the Pope & Talbot companies came at an auspicious time. The Second World War massively stimulated the lumber market and also allowed Pope & Talbot, with its fleet of cargo ships, to make a fortune shipping war material to Europe. In the 1940s Pope & Talbot used these profits to construct a huge new mill in Oakridge, Oregon; to buy additional timberlands on the western shore of Puget Sound and in the Oregon Cascades; and to rebuild the Port Gamble mill. This made Port Gamble the home of the longest continuously operating sawmill in North America. Pope & Talbot and its subsidiaries are still major lumber producers and are currently the third largest private timber owners in the Northwest.