Boards, Barrels, and Boxshooks: The Economics of Downeast Lumber in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Abstract

pride filled editor William Wheeler as he quoted the Philadelphia Press for the 19 November 1859 edition of the Bangor Whig and Courier: "The state of Maine has, for more than a quarter of a century, carried on trade with the Spanish West India Islands to a greater extent than any other nation on the habitable globe?' This effusive comment referred to an interdependent trade between the Pine Tree State and Cuba that peaked in the years immediately preceding the American Civil War. Between 1857 and 1860 the commercial exchange between the two trading partners was vigorous, employing 2,090 vessels .1 More than just vigorous, the trade was also, at least for a time, balanced and mutually beneficial. Maine's lumber merchants found a large and steady customer in Cuba. Cuba's plantation owners, assured of a reliable supply of cheap lumber from Maine, were able to expand their sugar production onto fresh forest soils that had previously held indispensable reserves of timber. Late in the nineteenth century, however, rapid exploitation of these natural endowments — forests and soils — began to take its toll. Furthermore, technological changes that revolutionized the Cuban sugar industry also altered its David Demeritt