"Mac" Ritter, then owner of Ritter Nurseries, Maple Grove,
standing in front of the Benton Christian Church
following the planting of trees
in front of the church.
Some family names in the upper end of Columbia County are immediately recognizable by those whose toes have dipped in the waters of Fishingcreek. Members of these families are often also well known outside of our area. From time to time we recognize members of local families who achieve national recognition, but actually never lived Back Home in Benton, PA, We'll talk about one of these people, a man by the name of William McClellan Ritter.
W. M. Ritter (1864-1952), known simply as "Uncle Mac" to most of the local Ritter family, was generally regarded as the "father" of the Appalachian hardwood industry and the founder of the world's largest hardwood lumber company. He was born February 19, 1864, on a farm not far from Hughesville in Franklin Township, Lycoming County, where his father had a water-driven sawmill that could manufacture about one hundred thousand feet of lumber a year, enough to keep the family in "molasses and coffee." By 1890, timber in Franklin Township was nearly depleted.
Ritter went to Bluefield, West Virginia, when he was 26 with $1,700 and listened to the guidance of a Hughesville lumberman by the name of John Paulhamus and it was there he began his lumber career in earnest. He did not come home to stay for another 66 years. In 1901 when he was 37 years old, Ritter incorporated his business as the W. M. Ritter Lumber Company and acquired several large lumber companies over the years. From its original inception in West Virginia and Virginia, the company expanded operations to 16 principal sawmills in additional states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. The company also diversified beyond the hardwood lumber industry into such areas as coal, gas and railroads. From 1895 to 1899 the main office of the W. M. Ritter Lumber Company was in Welch, West Virginia, and later moved to Columbus, Ohio.
W. M. Ritter died May 21, 1952. At the time of Ritter's death, his estate was valued at $3.6 million in spite of paying his former wife well over a million dollars in alimony and giving his employees well over $3 million and sending countless checks back to his home community in Lycoming Country with notes that read "so the ladies can have a brighter Christmas." The Georgia-Pacific Corporation, a company that today employees 55,000 people, took over the assets of his company on October 1, 1960.
Information for this article came from interviews with his nephew Harry Ritter, North Street, Benton; the Hearst Corporation's The American Weekly, which was published for inclusion as a supplement to the Hearst Sunday newspapers; from family journals and newspaper collections in the Ritter family; from the memorial edition of The Red Jacketeer, a publication of the Red Jacket Coal Corporation; and from The Hardwood Bark, a monthly publication issued during the 1920s "for the employees of the W.M. Ritter Lumber Company and subsidiary companies,"
In addition to articles on the Ritter company and timber industry, The Hardwood Bark had a news column featuring human-interest stories and devoted space to the Red Jacket Consolidation Coal and Coke Company located in Red Jacket, West Virginia, which the W.M. Ritter Lumber Company acquired in 1923.
William M. Ritter, the youngest of ten children, was the son of Franklin and Elizabeth Morris Ritter. His mother was a member of the Morris family which produced Robert Morris, the Revolutionary patriot who largely financed the Colonies in their struggle against England.
A nephew named after his famous uncle, W. M. "Mac" Ritter, a former Muncy and Benton nurseryman, resident and father of Harry Ritter, North Street, Benton, once explained how his uncle, W. M. Ritter, was named.
In a note Mac Ritter wrote:
"My grandfather (Marion Ritter, a brother of lumberman William Ritter) having enlisted in the Union Army, served under General George B. McClellan. Upon being discharged at the age of twenty years, he arrived home to learn that he had a baby brother who was born only a few days before (February 19, 1864) and who had as yet not been named. My grandfather requested the privilege of naming the new baby, which was granted, and promptly called him William McClellan Ritter. When I was born, being the first grandchild (of Marion Ritter), my grandfather asked and received the same privilege. He named me after his brother, W. M. Ritter. "I have always considered this a great honor, and as I grow older it seems even more so." |
Ritter had a significant impact on families associated with his lumbering companies. Fathers who were loggers often had a wife, children and grandchildren who worked for or were dependent on the company--as a cook or assistant, a teacher, or a company-store clerk. The life in a lumber camp was all that many knew: children married children of other lumber-camp employees, few finished high school and life as a teen involved hard work in the woods with the goal of working to become a logger or blacksmith, a timber cutter, or even a superintendent.
Logging companies were mobile, migrating as forests were stripped in order to keep workers close to the worksites. Locally, we have the towns like Ricketts and Jamison City to compare to the large operations of the Ritter Lumber Company. Still, there were significant differences in the formation of the logging camps in the Ritter empire and the operations on North Mountain.
The Ritter camps included churches, schools, dining facilities, stores, and doctors' offices. Trains moved the camps serpentine-like through the mountains from location to location. Workers often stayed in modified train cars that remained on sidings of the railroad tracks. Dormitory cars served for the unattached workers. When an area no longer supported the workers, the employees and their families would button down the items in their living quarters, take up the walkways and steps, and move the camp up the tracks. Camps would move on average once each year. When the camp settled in its new location, they would reassemble temporary structures like walkways and stairs and the cycle of life would simply resume in a new location.
The Ritter Lumber Company provided small company stores where employees and their families could purchase items, paying with cash or with "scrip" taken directly out of the worker's paycheck. Misuse of scrip could lead to a longtime debt and thus insured continued labor. Small schools were common as were ministers, doctors and dentists and baseball teams.
Each logging camp employed several cooks and necessary assistants in order to produce food for employees. Workers were fed well since healthy employees were good employees and employees with full stomachs tended to be loyal employees. Each dinner cost approximately 25¢, or about 15% of the daily wages. There were no labor unions.
The W.H. Ritter Lumber Company sprang from a single mill in Mercer County, West Virginia, to become the largest manufacturer of hardwood lumber in the world with operations in eight states, owning over 300,000 acres of land. In addition to its milling operation, the Ritter Lumber Company operated railroad companies with a reported 72 locomotives for hauling lumber and coal and a major producer of coal. Where they operated coal mines, they also built company towns.
During World War I, W.M. Ritter was asked by the President of the United States to serve on the Council of National Defense and later served with Bernard M. Baruch on the Industrial Board of the National Chamber of Commerce. He advised five Presidents of the United States during his lifetime. Ritter served as a director of the Clinchfield Coal Corporation, C.C.& O. Railroad, Riggs National Bank and Virginian Railway Company.
Mr. Ritter provided an employee pension plan. In 1924, Mr. Ritter gave away approximately three million dollars of stock with no strings attached to employees of his company who deserved the money for their loyalty and hard work. President Calvin Coolidge was so impressed that he called Ritter to the White House to discuss it, although the action later triggered the first test of the newly passed gift-tax feature of the Revenue Act.
"I'm not the man who made the ocean salty,
And neither did I build the Brooklyn bridge;
I did not build the Pyramids of Egypt,
Or storm the forts on Missionary Ridge.
But I'm the man who MADE the lumber business;
I put the word called "Hardwood" in the book,
Forever to remain an inspiration
When future generations pause to look.
--Poem on a 1919 dinner place card
The W.M. Ritter Lumber Company merged into Georgia Pacific Corp on October 1, 1960. Georgia Pacific operated the mills for about a year after the merger, then closed a number of them.
 |
A Shay locomotive used by W. M. Ritter Company, McClure, Virginia |
Georgia Pacific operated the Brimstone Railroad until 1965 when it was sold to the Southern Railroad.
W. M. Ritter had the determination to be honest in his dealings and to work hard. He once told this story set in the year 1894. One morning he was riding to the mill on Dry Fork of the Tug River when he came upon another horse rider. Here is the story in Ritter's own words...
"Good morning," I said to him; and he replied, "Good m-o-r-n-i-n-g." I continued: "Where are you from?"
He answered, "I live on the head of Bradshaw Creek."
I said to him, "Is there any timber up there?"
"Oh," he said, "lots of it."
"Is it good timber?" I said.
"The finest timber you ever looked at," he replied.
I queried further, "Who owns it?"
And he said, "An old man by the name of Ritter."
I kept on by asking him the question, "Does Ritter know anything about timber?"
He replied, saying, "He knows all about timber--but that's all he does know."
William M. Ritter did get taught a thing or two by his first wife. He once steamed, "That is enough tribute for any one man to pay any one woman in one life," as he tried to declare a moratorium on further alimony payments to his former wife, Gertrude Divine Webster.
The Washington, D.C. home of Mr. Ritter, in which he passed awayMr. Ritter spend many happy days in this house. Here, too, he was confined for over four years following a stroke on January 20, 1948. And here he died just inside the three windowed room just above the evergreen tree. |
He had already given his wife $1,250,000, a house at 2701 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. in an area now known as "Embassy Row," a 700-acre estate with a twenty-five room house in Manchester, Vermont, his furniture and most of his wine cellar as a 1922 peace treaty, and all Mr. Ritter asked in return was a little peace and quiet. Her response came immediately following the lumberman's settlement, as she gave Ritter the "most awful lecture he had ever received from her."
Mr. Ritter later said he stood and took it, knowing that responses would only prolong the oratory. Mrs. Ritter then headed for Vermont where she filed for divorce citing cruelty and desertion. The desertion, it turned out, was by her and the cruelty was not to her but alleged to be to her animals. She charged that the former husband had once used a horse whip while riding and had once kicked a dog.
"To err is human, to forgive divine." |
Mrs. Ritter-Webster's maiden name was Devine--not divine--so naturally she did not forgive the debt. She hauled her husband, 67, into court in New York. In the Empire State, it made no difference how rich a wife was or how hard the wife milked the husband. |
The jury at times laughed out loud at testimony; for example, the jury had difficulty understanding why Mrs. Ritter could not remember if Mr. Ritter had given her a lump-sum payment of $600,000 on one occasion. In 1921, Mrs. Ritter had her lawyer state that she could not possibly live on less than $70,000 a year, and would not accept one penny less than $60,000 a year.
The presiding official, a Judge Gary, himself very wealthy, took Mr. Ritter into a private chamber and advised him, as a friend, to give her more than she asked for--sort of a humanitarian gesture. Judge Gary was a "master mind of the steel business," who thought in such vast figures that anything below a million was small change to him. In the presence of such wealth, a mere lumberman worth somewhere between three and twelve million may have felt insecure. Ritter agreed with Gary's suggestion. In other words, Ritter went into the room to protest paying his wife $60,000 a year, and walked out agreeing to pay her $10,000 a year more than she asked for.
The actual signing of the papers took place in Philadelphia in 1922. Ritter came to a reception room in a hotel, and there found his wife sobbing her heart out, a strange sight for a woman who would soon be free from a man she obviously didn't like. She was about to receive a million and a quarter dollars, furniture, and a fortune in real estate. Many women would have had a slight smile on their faces.
Mr. Ritter took her hand and the two strolled out of the hotel. He consoled her as they walked toward the offices of the Girard Trust Company. "There," he said, "we signed this and we signed that" and the agreement was executed.
The second the signatures hit the page, Mrs. Ritter got up and delivered her tirade against him, the "big bawling" out as he called it. When asked by council how old she was, she insisted that Mr. Ritter be asked. She finally agreed to divulge her age. "Ageless," was her reply and upon further questioning she said that she was "approaching 80."
On the stand, Mr. Ritter said they had agreed on a divorce in 1910 and he had given her $600,000 and then went to Switzerland to obtain the divorce. She wrote and asked for forgiveness, so he took her back, but things went badly and back to talk of divorce they went. Mr. Ritter advanced two propositions: one for a million dollars, $100,000 on the spot and $100,000 a year until she reached the million. The second was for her to receive their two houses and cash.
Mrs. Ritter, upon advice of council, agreed to accept the Washington house and $500,000 in cash ($100,000 immediately) paid over five years, and for the rest of her life she would receive $70,000 yearly. In return, Mrs. Ritter had to promise not to "throw any mud."
The matter of the liquor remained. It was split between them, so "she could make sure he didn't get all the gin." He was to get some of the furnishings of the home, but all he got was "some junk, a few old bedsteads and the dishpan."
After the divorce was final, Mr. Ritter married a woman thirty years younger than he, a woman by the name of Anita Bell. The following year, Mrs. Ritter married Hugh Webster, but divorced him shortly after.
When she was asked if Mr. Ritter had indeed given her $600,000 when Mr. Ritter left for Switzerland in 1910, Mrs. Webster thought for a moment and then allowed that she just could not remember. Following a huge gasp that roared through the court room, she quickly added, "I didn't feel well that year."
Mr. Ritter's second marriage was what the "American Weekly" called a "Cinderella" romance. Anita Owen Bell came from an aristocratic and Southern family left poor by the Civil War. At the time she met Mr. Ritter she was working as a school teacher in a Southern Baptist Church school.
The eventual divorce payout of Mr. Ritter places him right up there with the likes of Sebastian Spering Kresge. Doris Kresge for many years held the title of the "world's richest divorcee" because of the two million dollars S.S. Kresge is said to have paid her in alimony in 1927. That title ended when she went from a divorcee to a princess when she married a Persian nobleman by the name of Prince Farid Khan Sidri. In court, she denied that she had demanded ten million in order to father a child by Kresge. Mr. Kresge said that he declined her demands.
William McClellan Ritter died May 21, 1952, at his home in Washington, D.C. On May 24, he returned forever to his native soil in Lycoming County. Services were in the Trinity Lutheran Church in Hughesville. Later, in a beautiful tree-shaded cemetery among the gently rolling hills, beside the mother and father he loved, he went to his long rest after 88 years.
"Now God has called this lumberman
To quit his work and rest.
But I am sure that this is well,
For He knows what is best.
So, Mr. Ritter, fare thee well!
You're going on before.
"Twill not be long until we'll meet
Upon the other shore.
Then you can gather up your crew.
Some thousands there will be.
Buy up a tract--we'll help you log.
Through all eternity.
--C. N. Greiner
