St. Lawrence Boom and Lumber Company

The St. Lawrence Boom and Manufacturing Company was founded in 1802 by a Colonel Cecil C. Clay, a former US Army Brigadier-General from Philadelphia.

Colonel Clay recognized the natural resources in the large stands of virgin white pine and red spruce in Pocahontas County, which today involves enormous portions of the Monongahela National Forest. At this point in history, loggers calculated that these massive forests would have time to replenish themselves by the time they cut from one side of the wilderness to the other.

White pine was an extremely useful wood. It was light, versatile, and capable of supplying many different needs in paper, furniture, and household materials. An enterprising logger could purchase a stand of promising forest, erect his own mill, cut and process the logs and float them down the river. Sawmill towns mushroomed in West Virginia and especially in its Eastern Panhandle.

The St. Lawrence Boom and Lumber Company brought the first log drive down the Greenbrier River and soon erected "The Big Mill" out of the choicest timbers. From this beginning emerged the largest softwood mill in the country. Over time, much of the Greenbrier River was harnessed for this form of heavy water-traffic. The river was sculpted with dams, spills, holding areas for the timbers, eyots to control the speed of the flow, cribs, water-pockets and sluiceways. Storage was needed for the millions of logs cut from Pocahontas and upper Greenbrier counties. As BJ Gudmundsson of Patchwork Films reported:

The Greenbrier River was harnessed at Ronceverte with dams, cribs, booms, pockets and equipment to receive and store the endless millions of logs cut from the mountains of upper Greenbrier and Pocahontas sections and floated down to feed the ravenous and unending whirling buzzing saws. They had a capacity of 110,000 board feet per day.

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