Logging the Virgin Forest: Northern Sweden in the Early-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Market-oriented exploitation of northern Sweden's vast forests began during the first decades of the nineteenth century.' Prior to that time in Sweden, human use of the forest and human influence on forest ecosystems was limited. But during the nineteenth century, logging grew to encompass almost all forestland in the region. By the beginning of the twentieth century, successive felling of the largest trees had drastically changed the structure, age distribution, and species composition of many forests. Logging also brought about changes in forestland ownership and changes in the economic and social structures for inhabitants of northern Sweden. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, private companies bought from independent farmers almost half the productive forestland.' The farmers entered a new marketoriented economy that involved selling timber, timber concessions, and forestland to sawmill owners. They were also involved in cutting timber during winter, sledding the logs out of the forest, and then floating them downriver in the spring to sawmills on the coast. Nineteenth-century logging in Scandinavia was characterized by a timber-frontier movement that shifted toward new, unexploited oldgrowth forests further inland and further north on the Scandinavian peninsula in a constant search for pine forests containing large-diameter timber.' Rapidly increasing demand for sawn wood and square timber in the industrially developing countries of Western Europe drove the frontier movement, which started in Norway during the early-nineteenth century but soon crossed the border to Sweden and advanced northward. At midnineteenth century several institutional changes facilitated timber exports from northern Sweden. New technology and new means of communication, such as steam-powered sawmills and the telegraph, were introduced, and northern Sweden's dense network of rivers facilitated exploitation. The rivers drain the interior forestland and flow southeasterly; their long periods of high water level make it possible to float timber from far inland. All these factors contributed to the expansion of the Swedish sawmill industry. In 1850, timber exports accounted for 15 percent of the total value of Sweden's exports. Twenty years later this share had increased to 51 percent, and the total export value had more than tripled." Almost all sawmill expansion took place in northern Sweden, with Vasternorrland County and the area around the city of Sundsvall becoming centers for the developing industry. Mills took timber from the vast forests in the counties of Vasternorrland and jamtland. The timber that sustained the economy of the Sundsvall district was mainly floated to the coast on two rivers, Ljungan and Indalsalven, and their tributaries (see figure 1). By the end of the nineteenth century this district had become a leading sawmill area and Sweden was the world's leading exporter of sawn wood products. Swedes regarded timber export as an important prerequisite to economic growth and industrialization.'