A. B. Hammond

Who was A. B. Hammond?

Andrew Benoni Hammond was an American lumberman. He developed the Missoula Mercantile Co. He built the Bitterroot Valley Railroad and the Astoria Columbia River Railroad. He was president of the Hammond Lumber Co. and the Hammond Steamship Co.

Born in New Brunswick, Hammond left home at 16 years old to work in the logging camps of Maine and Pennsylvania. He arrived in Montana in 1867, worked as a woodcutter and store clerk, eventually becoming a partner in the mercantile firm of Bonner, Eddy and Company. Under Hammond’s management this became the Missoula Mercantile Company, the largest mercantile between St. Paul and Portland. Hammond and his partners received the contract to build the Northern Pacific from Helena to Spokane. In the 1890s Hammond moved to the West Coast and built two more railroads. In 1900 he began to assemble one of the largest lumber companies on the West Coast, including the world’s largest redwood lumber company and the world’s largest lumber yard in Los Angeles.

Andrew Hammond is most known for his role in the poaching of federal timber during his years in Montana, and his extreme anti-union efforts during the early twentieth century. Ironically, much of the Hammond Lumber Company lands that had been illegally acquired under the Timber and Stone Act in Humboldt County eventually formed the bulk of Redwood National Park.