page_title: West Coast lumber trade
section_title: Steam schooners
hierarchical_section_title: West Coast lumber trade / Steam schooners
caption_attribution_description: English: Aerial port side view of the American cargo vessel Esther Johnson. (Naval Historical Collection) "Australian War Memorial notice: Copyright expired - public domain—This term describes material held in the National Collection that is clearly out of the period of copyright protection. Material that has passed out of the period of copyright protection is known as being in the “public domain” and is free of known copyright restrictions."
context_page_description: The West Coast lumber trade was a maritime trade route on the West Coast of the United States. It carried lumber from the coasts of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington mainly to the port of San Francisco. The trade included direct foreign shipment from ports of the Pacific Northwest and might include another product characteristic of the region, salmon, as in the schooner Henry Wilson sailing from Washington state for Australia with "around 500,000 feet of lumber and canned salmon" in 1918.
  The trade was instrumental in founding shipping empires such as the Dollar Steamship Company in which its founder, Captain Robert Dollar, emigrated from Scotland, worked in the lumber camps of Canada and, after moving to San Francisco in 1888 and buying timber tracts, founded a shipping line that extended to China.
context_section_description: Soon steam schooners (wooden but powered) replaced the small two-masters in the dog-hole trade and larger schooners, such as the still existing C.A. Thayer and the Wawona, were built for longer voyages and bigger cargo. West Coast shipyards continued to build sail-rigged lumber schooners until 1905 and wooden steam schooners until 1923. In 1907 observers noted the increase in size of schooners.  The first three-masted schooner built on the Coast was launched in 1875.  It was also the first lumber schooner to exceed 300 tons.  Ship wrights built the first four-master in 1886 and the first five-master in 1896.  The later were more generally involved in the overseas trade.  Sail schooners grew from fifty to 1,100 tons during this period.  More than 50 major shipbuilders operated on the Pacific Coast during the era of the coast wise schooners.  Demand for coastwise lumber shipping continued until after the First World War and total lumber transported by the railroads did not exceed its seaborne competition until about 1905.  Even in the 1870s mills shipped lumber directly from some dog-holes to Asia and South America.
  The last wooden steam lumber schooner built was Esther Johnson constructed by Matthews Shipbuilding, Hoquiam, Washington in 1923 for the A. B. Johnson Lumber Company. Esther Johnson was 1,104 GRT of wooden construction with planking of three inch Douglas fir, 208 ft 4 in (63.50 m) long by 43 ft 6 in (13.26 m) and with 15 ft 2 in (4.62 m) draft. On 29 March 1943 the ship was purchased by the War Shipping Administration and by June had arrived in Australia to become part of the U.S. Army's Southwest Pacific Area fleet as X-9. Esther Johnson arrived in Milne Bay on 4 October 1943 and, capable of transporting 100 ft (30 m) wooden piles sufficient to build an entire pier, was instrumental in building piers at the bases at Lae, Finschhafen in New Guinea and Tacloban in the Philippines. The ship was bombed on arrival at Lae and both bombed and strafed at Tacloban and at war's end was badly damaged by shipworms. The badly leaking ship returned from Manila to Melbourne for repairs and then returned to the Philippines going into the reserve fleet on 20 December 1947 at Subic Bay before being sold to the Philippine government on 23 February 1948. The older and slightly larger Barbara C, built as Pacific, also served in the Southwest Pacific in the same role.
caption: Esther Johnson, Australian waters as U.S. Army X-9
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