A Giant Hardwood Firm of the Past

By Gage McKinneY Contributing Editor

LTRING the first six decades of Ythe twentieth century E. J. Stanton and Son Lumber Co. was the best known name in hardwood in Southern California. But in 1894 when Stanton began making deliveries in Los Angeles by horse-drawn wagon the product wasn't hardwood-it was sugar pine.

E. J. Stanton, the founder of the firm, had learned the lumber business from his father amid the roar of their family's sawmill at Sheridan, Mi. There, white pine lumber was the principal forest product. But by the 1890s the most successful Midwestern lumbermen foresaw that the stands of white pine would soon be exhausted.

By l89l Stanton himself had become sales manager for the Saginaw Salt and Lumber Co., an important Midwestern sawmill firm. In that year the firm, anxious to establish new sources for lumber before the local pine ran out, sent him to Flagstaff, Az., to build a sawmill. They called the mill the Saginaw-Manistee Lumber Co.

Once he had come as far as Arizona, Stanton saw opportunity for himself even further west. In 1893 he left the Saginaw firm and came to California, attracted by the Western sugar pine, a wood comparable to the white pine of the Lake States. He made contact with some of lhe best sugar pine sawmills and in the following year he opened a distribution yard in Los Angeles.

E. J. Stanton Lumber Co., as the firm was originally called, first established its local and its national reputation for high quality lumber through its sales of this California pine. As its business grew, it became the accredited sales agents for some of the biggest pine producers in

Story at a Glance

Historic hardwood distribulor grows with region . diver. sifies product line . . . trains numerous industry leaders

California, including the Madera Sugar Pine Co. of Madera and Michigan-California Lumber Co. of Camino. Shortly after the turn of the century, the firm was shipping pine by rail throughout the Midwest and Northeast.

But despite this success as a pine

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(Continued from Previous Page) distributor, it was as a hardwood lumber distributor that the Stanton firm built its lasting reputation. cluding those used in Los Angeles, were distributed through two firms in San Francisco. White Brothers Lumber Co. began supplying the hardwoods needed on the coast in 1872. In 1882 Allen & Tuggle Co., which became better known a few years later as J. E. Higgins Lumber Co., entered the hardwood competition. By the 1890s, though, Los Angeles had grown to have a population of 70,000 and needed its own hardwood distributor. the firm soon began selling Philippine lumber from coast to coast.

From its earliest involvement in hardwoods, E. J. Stanton and Son stocked imported hardwoods as well as those sawn in the Eastern U.S. At first its imported hardwoods, primarily Central American mahog?try, came to Stanton through Eastern wholesalers. Later Stanton established its own sources of supply for foreign lumber.

After he had enjoyed success as both a hardwood and softwood distributor for nearly 20 years, E. J. Stanton began to look forward to the day when his son, Leroy H. Stanton, would begin to take responsibility for the daily opera-

Following his initial success in the pine business, probably late in the 1890s, Stanton began inventorying hardwoods, making E. J. Stanton the first hardwood concern in Southern California.

Prior to the Stanton interest in hardwoods, nearly all of the hardwoods used on the West Coast, in-

Before l9l2 Stanton began importing Japanese white oak, lumber which was usually short in length but unusually free of defects. Much of this material went into the furniture plants in Los Angeles where its uniform texture was valued. Stanton also built a flooring plant where much of the imported oak was run into slc x 2 inch strip flooring.

In l9l8 Stanton began importing Philippine mahogany and apitong, lumber manufactured across the Pacific by a sawmill firm owned by American and Filipino interests. Using the same national sales network that had helped Stanton distribute sugar pine throughout the nation, tions. In l9l2 the son graduated from Stanford University, came home and went to work in his father's office. A short time later the father packed his bags and headed for a long vacation in Europe, leaving his son in complete charge.

When E. J. Stanton returned he found that the business had been managed successfully during his absence, so he changed the name to E. J. Stanton and Son and gave Roy a substantial share of the owner-

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