A Prosperous Sawmill Town

A Prosperous Sawmill Town. How Forest Products Came To Drive The Economy In And Around Davis. , The town of Davis' most visible economic sectors today are hospitality, recreation, and tourism, but for many who live here, forest products have provided livelihood for generations. When J. L. Rumbarger's sawmill opened in 1886, other forest industries, like a paper pulp mill and a leather tannery using spruce bark, soon followed. The sawmill was owned by four more companies during its 38 years of operation and once employed up to 300 people. It produced and shipped more than one billion board-feet of lumber (or a billion times a one foot by one foot piece of wood, one inch thick). Dwindling timber supplies and changing technologies in paper making, building techniqes, and industrial uses of leather ended most of Davis' forest industry in the 1920s, but timber production and processing still provide jobs in the area today., (Captions):, The sawmills, tannery, and pulp mills brought enough money to Davis to warrant the expense of hiring the skilled stonemasons that it took to construct this bank, with offices above. The arrow in the background image below shows its location., Timber industry towns often resembled frontier settlements. Prosperity and a large population were new and sudden, leading to many temporary wooden buildings, dirt roads, and a booming economy of merchants and saloons., For some workers, housing was portable, like the shanties at left - much like log camp dwellings - lined up along the railroad tracks., Surrounding the commercial strip, houses were more permanent, but still built quickly from abundant wood supplies to accommodate a fast-growing workforce, their families, and those whose businesses depended on them., This view shows a mix of single- and multiple-family dwellings and boarding houses that stood behind the railroad wye, a turning place for trains and locomotives alongside the three tracks that passed through most of Davis., Leaders in the Davis timber industry, George Thompson, Edward "Squire" Babcock, and Fred Viering pose with three bear cubs captured in 1911 in Blackwater Canyon. Babcock owned the Babcock Boom and Lumber Company. Thompson managed it after his family sold the Blackwater Lumber Company to the "Squire." Viering was the chief engineer, inventing new machines for logging in the woods until he was killed in a railroad accident on Canaan Mountain in 1924., What is today a grassy parkland in front of downtown Davis was once filled with railroad tracks, mill buildings, and the products that they made and shipped. The relationship between timber products and downtown wasn't just physical proximity. The businesses provided essential goods and services to attract and keep a workforce, and the income that this workforce generated kept these establishments in business., Credits: Background / Pete Johnson - Top Left / Pete Johnson - Middle Left / Western Maryland Railway Historical Society - Top Right / Western Maryland Railway Historical Society - Middle Right / Tekavec-Zadell, Layouts and text by David A. Vago Historic Resource Planning and Design