For more than a half century, when the ice went out each spring, the St. Croix became a river of pine from its headwaters in Wisconsin to Stillwater. But on June 12, 1914, the last log arrived at the boom site north of Stillwater, marking the end of large-scale logging in the St. Croix Valley.

Commercial lumbering began in Minnesota in 1839 along the St. Croix. White pine, the preferred choice for construction, fueled the growth of towns along the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers to St. Louis and beyond.

Loggers, eager for prime stands, moved north, as far as the Canadian border. By 1900 Minnesota’s logging peaked, with more than 2.3 billion board feet of lumber produced from the state’s forests. “In 1900, Minnesota’s pine harvest could build more than 60,000 two-story homes or a nine-foot-wide boardwalk circling the equator,” says Jeff Johns, manager of the Forest History Center in Grand Rapids.

But by 1907, many of Minnesota’s great forests had been cut over and the state’s lumber industry began declining. A number of sawmills closed and lumber companies looked to the Pacific Northwest and the South for lumber.

The remaining lumber companies shifted production from sawing logs to pulp, paper, matchsticks, and manufactured building materials. Logging continued on a smaller scale, with the last log drive in 1937 on the Little Fork River.

Jessica Kohen, Minnesota Historical Society. This article was first published in the 2013 issue of Minnesota Good Age.