In the spring of 1918, a group of loggers, hired by the Ketchikan Spruce Mill, went ashore in Port Stewart north of Ketchikan with a specific job in mind: To cut Sitka spruce to help defeat Germany in World War I.

The money for their work came from the Spruce Production Division of the U.S. Army. Before World War I, there were barely 100 planes being built each year in the United States, despite the fact that America was widely credited with creating aviation in 1903.

Europe, on the other hand, was turning out tens of thousands of airplanes each year, and many were now playing a significant role above the battlefields of World War I, which had begun in 1914.

With the U.S. now actively involved in World War I, there was a race to catch up.

Sitka spruce was highly prized in airplane construction because it was a lightweight, strong and resilient wood ideal for aircraft. It was crucial for wing spars and fuselage frames that were then not subject to as much stress as later designs, which would need metal construction.

Even before the U.S. declared war in 1917, the Pacific Northwest had supplied 2 million board feet of spruce to the armies of Great Britain and France. But in order to create an “air force,” the U.S. military estimated it would need more than 10 million board feet of spruce each year.

Most of the division’s efforts took place in Washington and Oregon, where more than 150 million board feet of spruce was eventually cut and shipped east to the factories where the airplanes were assembled for the war effort.

One giant sawmill, in Vancouver, Washington, was built for the division, and employed nearly 5,000 people and produced a million board feet of lumber each week at its peak in mid-1918. Hundreds of miles of new railroads were also built in the Pacific Northwest to access and ship the timber.

Alaska was a little too remote, and undeveloped, to be a major source for the immediate war effort, but federal officials recognized that — long term — it could provide a significant role in providing wood resources for the country.

The Alaska Department of Commerce estimates that just under one million board feet of spruce was cut at multiple sites in Southeast Alaska, including Port Stewart, and shipped south to mills in Vancouver and Port Angeles, Washington.

But from the Port Stewart project came the germination of the Alaska timber industry, even though it would take nearly three decades to flower.

The Port Stewart operation was overseen by a young Forest Service forester, B. Frank Heintzleman, who would eventually push through the Tongass Timber Act of 1947 that would lead to the establishment of pulp mills in Ketchikan and Sitka.

Benjamin Franklin Heintzleman was born in Pennsylvania and educated at Yale, where he met the first head of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot. Heintzleman joined the federal agency after he graduated and was posted in Washington state.

He was sent to Alaska to manage the Sitka spruce operation in 1918. From 1918 to 1934, he was the assistant regional forester for the territory, and from 1937 to 1953 he was the primary regional forester. From 1953-1957, he was the territorial governor.

From his earliest days in Alaska, Heintzleman recognized the vast potential of timber production in the Tongass National Forest. He also realized that the distances and transportation costs involved meant that the private sector would have trouble making that industry financially viable. So, he was constantly pushing the federal government to take steps to subsidize the process. His efforts led to him being called “Mr. Alaska” by his compatriots at the Forest Service.

As early as 1928, he was calling for federal subsidies and long-term contracts to support Alaska timber production. The Timber Act of 1947 would eventually create those contracts and subsidies.

When Heintzleman arrived in Alaska in 1918 to supervise the spruce project, he saw boosting the timber industry as crucial to Alaska’s economic future. By 1915, approximately 25 million board feet of lumber was being produced each year, most of it going to local construction and to create salmon boxes for the expanding salmon canning industry.

The salmon industry itself would get a big boost during World War I when canned salmon was tapped to help feed the troops in Europe.

In his early reports back to the Forest Service in headquarters, Heintzleman estimated that Southeast Alaska could support up to 500 million board feet of spruce and hemlock production as “sustainable.”

His estimates would lead to long-term contracts that would commit more than 8 billion board feet to Ketchikan Pulp Co. and more than 6 billion board feet to Alaska Lumber and Pulp in Sitka. Millions of dollars would also go to the companies for the roads they developed into logging areas.

The Spruce Production Division war effort was a success. Nearly 5,000 airplanes were delivered to the U.S. Army Air Corps and American allies. The war effort also led to the creation of the Pacific Aero Products Co. of Seattle, which is now known as Boeing.

The division, which had 30,000 soldiers and civilian employees, immediately shut down after the World War I armistice in November 1918.

In Alaska, Heintzleman soldiered on, continuing to promote the regional timber industry.

In the early 1940s, Alaska spruce production got another boost when airplane production increased in the run-up to World War II, but by mid-war, lighter-weight metals like aluminum had replaced wood in war planes.

After World War II, the newly opened Alaska timber industry also got another war-related boost. Japan needed billions of board feet of timber to rebuild, and that led to the Japanese-owned Alaska Lumber and Pulp opening the Sitka pulp mill and its related sawmills, including in Wrangell.