Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:55:40.909Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Mystery of Fuel Wood Marketing In the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Arthur H. Cole
Affiliation:
Professor of Business Economics, Emeritus, Harvard University

Abstract

Although fuel wood still supplied 70 per cent of the total energy requirements of the United States in 1900, a marketing mechanism for the millions of cords consumed each year is not evident. Professor Cole concludes that no other commodity of such importance had such little effect on distributive institutions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1970

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Reynolds, R. V. and Pierson, Albert H., Fuel Wood Used in the United States 1630–1930. Circular No. 641, United States Department of Agriculture, (Washington, D.C., February, 1942)Google Scholar.

2 Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson, Princeton, 1746–1896 (Princeton, 1946), 188Google Scholar; Report of the President of Harvard University to the Overseers on the State of the Institution for the Academic Year, 1827–28, 58.

3 Statistical Information Relating to Certain Branches of Industry in Massachusetts (June, 1855), 611.

4 Schurr, Sam H. et al., Energy in the American Economy, 1850–1975 (Baltimore, 1960), 4557.Google Scholar

5 Unpublished manuscript by William J. Keep on the evolution of heating and cooking stoves, Manuscript Division, Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business, 1916.

6 Flick, Alexander C., History of the State of New York (New York, 19331937), VI, 136.Google Scholar

7 Professor Paul W. Gates, in the course of various essays and other works, has touched upon the activities of farmers in cutting firewood. See, for example: “Changing Agriculture,” in The Challenge of Local History (Albany, 1968), 47, and Agriculture and the Civil War (New York, 1965), 137.

8 Rowe, William H., The Maritime History of Maine (New York, 1948), 239.Google Scholar

9 Report of Massachusetts Board of Directors of Internal Improvements (January 16, 1829), 34.

10 Directory of Charlestown and Brookline (and other towns), 1849–1850.

11 Report of President of Harvard University 1827–28, 58.

12 Foster, Margery S., Economic History of Harvard College in the Puritan Period, 1636–1712 (Cambridge, 1962), 168–69.Google Scholar

13 Brooks, Van Wyck, The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (New York, 1936), 27.Google Scholar

14 Morison, Samuel Eliot, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge 1936), 220.Google Scholar

15 Report of President of Harvard University 1827–28, 58.

16 Whicher, George F. (ed.), Remembrance of Amherst, An Undergraduate's Diary, 1846–1848.Google Scholar

17 Stevens, Frank W., The Beginnings of the New York Central Railroad (New York, 1926), 336.Google Scholar

18 White, John Henry Jr., American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830–1880 (Baltimore, 1968), 84.Google Scholar

19 Hargrave, Frank F., A Pioneer Indiana Railroad (Indianapolis, 1932), 68.Google Scholar

20 Fourth Annual Report of the Directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. to the Stockholders (Philadelphia, 1851), 5.

21 Eastern Railway Company Report (1848), 57.

22 Maintenance of Way Department, Pennsylvania Railroad, Report of the First Assistant Superintendent (Altoona, January 1, 1852), 67.Google ScholarFishlow, Albert, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy (Cambridge, 1966), 128.Google Scholar

23 Report of the Superintendent of Transportation, General Transportation Office, Pennsylvania Railroad Co. (Harrisburg, January 1, 1852), 67.

24 Gates, Agriculture and the Civil War, 137.

25 Hargrave, A Pioneer Indiana Railroad, 68.

26 Dick, Everett N., Vanguards of the Frontier (New York, 1941), 388.Google Scholar

27 Stevens, Beginnings of the New York Central Railroad, 336–38.

28 Bruce, Alfred W., The Steam Locomotive in America (New York, 1952), 36.Google Scholar

29 Albion, Robert G., Rise of New York Port (New York, 1939), 159.Google Scholar

30 Hunter, Louis C., Steamboats on the Western Rivers (Cambridge, 1949), 265–69.Google Scholar

31 Kreps, Theodore J., “Some Chapters on the Economic Development of the Alkali and Sulphuric Acid Industries in the United States,” (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1928).Google Scholar

32 Hedges, James B., The Browns of Providence Plantations (Cambridge, 1952).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Temin, Peter, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, 1964), 83.Google Scholar