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book: City of Wood
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City of Wood

San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024

About this book

2025 J.B. Jackson Book Prize, University of Virginia Center for Cultural Landscapes
2025 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize, Association of American Geographers
2025 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, Vernacular Architecture Forum

How San Franciscans exploited natural resources such as redwood lumber to produce the first major metropolis of the American West.

California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a base to exploit the rich natural resources of the American West. City of Wood examines how capitalists and workers logged the state’s vast redwood forests to create the financial capital and construction materials needed to build the regional metropolis of San Francisco. Architectural historian James Michael Buckley investigates the remote forest and its urban core as two poles of a regional “city.” This city consisted of a far-reaching network of spaces, produced as company owners and workers arrayed men and machines to extract resources and create human commodities from the region’s rich natural environment.

Combining labor, urban, industrial, and social history, City of Wood employs a variety of sources—including contemporary newspaper articles, novels, and photographs—to explore the architectural landscape of lumber, from backwoods logging camps and company towns in the woods to busy lumber docks and the homes of workers and owners in San Francisco. By imagining the redwood lumber industry as a single community spread across multiple sites—a “City of Wood”—Buckley demonstrates how capitalist resource extraction links different places along the production value chain. The result is a paradigm shift in architectural history that focuses not just on the evolution of individual building design across time, but also on economic connections that link the center and periphery across space.

Author / Editor information

James Michael Buckley is an urban planner and historian.

Reviews

City of Wood is a masterful work of history befitting the giant redwoods at its center. James Buckley guides the reader from forest to metropolis and through multiple scales of analysis, linking it all together, with gorgeous illustrations, into one breathtaking human landscape.
— Mary P. Ryan, Johns Hopkins University (emeritus), author of Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America

Scholars seeking insight into the formation of regional-metropolitan economies will value James Buckley’s expert and artful analysis of nature-capital regimes in northern California’s redwood bioregion. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, timber titans, financiers, managers, and workers transformed territory into property, forests into fields, trees into logs, and logs into lumber. The author’s encompassing scale and scope support a recalibration of metropole-hinterland relations seen as intrinsically dependent: the former a peak locale for enterprise, trade, and the addition of value, the latter a peripheral location for crude accumulation and entropy. Most ambitiously, Buckley’s findings compel us to redraw our originary maps for today’s “regional urban networks” to include California and America’s West and to reset our timelines accordingly.
— Greg Hise, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, coauthor of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region

With this impressive new book, James Buckley shows just how important it is to take a spatial approach to architectural and urban history. From the great redwood forests of Northern California to the booming city of San Francisco, Buckley guides us through the class-differentiated physical landscapes that capitalists and workers, almost all of them white men, built of wood along the Pacific Coast. The unsparing narrative tracks the devastating effects of unrelenting resource extraction, an assault that decimated ancient forests, and, coupled with industrial production, married the urban core with the countryside, creating a veritable, ever-changing City of Wood. Buckley gives the great struggles between capital and labor their due and tracks the impact of money and material, new technologies, and consumer desire on the modernizing architectural landscapes of the urbanizing West. A great gift of this book is the care that Buckley takes to document the places of everyday life in the City of Wood—the lumber camps, mill towns, docks, lumber yards, planing mills, employer mansions, worker housing, and office buildings—and the attempts to conserve what remained of the grand trees from which they were built, before the forest disappeared entirely.
— Marta Gutman, City College of New York, author of A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950

A great strength of Buckley’s work is his ability to simultaneously focus on micro and macro history… In lesser hands, this might have created a confusing, disorienting narrative. However, Buckley seamlessly oscillates between small and large stories, using engaging prose and anecdotes throughout. The result is a revealing, comprehensive narrative that paints a remarkably comprehensive portrait of San Francisco and northern California logging… This is a powerful, fascinating study that deserves, and will hopefully garner, a wide readership
— Pacific Historical Review

Following the supply chain from the forests to the docks and mills of San Francisco and into the corporate spaces that helped make the city a globally important commercial center, Buckley’s major addition to the literature for historians is to focus his analysis on the built environment that delineated class and control over redwood workers…He’s particularly convincing when writing about the conditions of labor and life for the loggers and mill workers transforming the redwoods into finished products. Buckley provides a compelling narrative of how workers adapted to difficult circumstances to create lives for themselves within the timber industry, from company housing in the forests to the workplaces of the urban lumber district in San Francisco and the residential hotels in the city that housed increasingly marginalized workers.
— History Journal

[This is] a book that bridges disciplines and integrates unexpected and often delightful sources.
— H-Net Environment

[Buckley's] project responds to a recent call for bridging the gap between the history of architecture and the history of the natural environment, and City of Wood provides a refreshing look at this intersection. Yet the book also stands as a contribution to the history of labor...[and] shows how those working on the front lines of the lumber industry have had agency.

— Natural Resources & Environment

Combining social, technological, and labor history, the book is rich with local archival material developed into a detailed descriptive study...[Buckley] presents a well-organized and detailed discussion...[that] encourages debate about topics such as the architectural impact of the hinterland/city dichotomy and adds strong scholarship to a multifaceted discussion.

— Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    xi
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    List of Illustrations

    xiii
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    Introduction: The Geography of the City of Wood

    1
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  • dPART I. The Landscape of Lumber
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    Figure 1.1

    20
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    1. City and Country: The Redwood Value Chain

    21
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  • PART II. Forest
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    Figure 2.1

    48
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    2. “The Factory without a Roof”: Mills and Camps in the Redwood Forest

    49
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    3. Mill and Mansion: The Landscape of Capital and Labor in Eureka

    75
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  • PART III. Metropolis
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    Figure 4.1

    114
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    4. The Redwood Value Chain in the City of Wood’s Urban Core

    115
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    5. The Space of Capital in San Francisco

    139
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    6. Lumber Workers and the Labor Landscape of San Francisco

    163
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  • PART IV. Region
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    Figure 7.1

    198
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    7. A Revolution in Distribution and Production

    199
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    8. Constructing a Modern Industrial Community: Company Towns in the Redwoods

    225
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    Conclusion: The Architecture of the City of Wood

    259
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    Acknowledgments

    271
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    Notes

    273
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    Index

    327
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 29, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781477330258
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.7560/330241
eBook ISBN: 9781477330258
Keywords for this book
California Redwood Industry; rapid urban development; redwood lumber; American West; Bay Area; Eureka; Humboldt County; architectural history; industry history; environmental history
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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