Sawmill- Don't know if you ever get to your town's library or how Canadian libraries work but down here we have what they call "inter-library loan" where a person can request getting a book if its not in your own library and your librarians will see if they can get it loaned to you.
A couple books that you might interesting.
The first one is called Sawmill (can't remember the rest of the title) by Smith (can't remember the first name) and it came out in 1986. Its about logging the last "virgin" forest in the eastern U.S. down in the Ouachita Mountains of Ark. and Okla. The dominant tree there then was the short-leaf pine. The time setting is basically the first 40 years of the 20th century and the last of the "cut and run" forestry business mindsets. What you might find interesting is that these sawmills were basically built typically around a single main power saw and a planer. Everything depended on them. The Ouachitas still produce a lot of wood based materials nowadays but has transitioned more to loblolly pine than the native short-leaf (they grow a bit faster). Some of the communities and mill sites mentioned in the book are just mostly relics in the woods now.
Another book is The Lumberman's Frontier: Three Centuries of Land Use, Society, and Change in America's Forests by Thomas Cox. I got our institution's librarian to buy the book because it sounded so cool but I have to admit I haven't read it all the way through yet. Its not BC but it does give the sense of movement back and forth across the U.S. up through the more modern times where our "wood baskets" are more or less in place although there is still ebb and flow among regions and as you've seen even countries.
As with most commodities, such as scrap metal, the trade in various wood types is global in scale...
Bookmarks