Once-thriving industry has nearly vanished in Northwest Montana

The Daily Inter Lake

Not long ago, rows of meticulously trimmed Scotch pine and Colorado blue spruce trees filled the Fincher property on Lake Blaine Road. Fincher's Evergreens was a successful business, operating primarily in Christmas trees but also selling spruce as landscaping trees.

Today, remnants of the tidy rows remain, but the business is defunct. Growing houses has proved a more profitable venture, and Skip Fincher and his brother plan to develop part of the property as a 30-lot subdivision.

"Land in the valley has got to the point where raising Christmas trees is not economical," he said.

Last year, fewer than 5,000 trees were cut in Montana. In contrast, Oregon, the nation's leading Christmas tree supplier, harvested 8 million this year.

For the better part of the 20th century, however, the Tobacco and Flathead valleys led the American Christmas tree industry. In 1956, at the height of the boom, 4.2 million trees were cut in Montana.

The business began in the 1920s with a nationwide shortage of Christmas trees. Few tree farms existed, and national forests were being heavily logged. In the East and Midwest, markets were desperate for trees.

"When they looked westward, all they had was plains. Then they reached the mountains, and all they had was trees. And these ones in Northwest Montana was pretty special because they held their needles," Darris Flanagan said Wednesday in a phone interview.

Flanagan, a retired teacher, historian and writer, has been connected to the tree industry almost since its inception. His maternal grandfather sold trees in the '30s when the business "really took off." His father began cutting wild Douglas fir in the early 1940s, and as soon as he was big enough, Flanagan helped with the harvest.

It was partly to honor this family history that the Fortine resident decided to write about the area's Christmas tree industry. When he first considered writing a book, Montana was still a major tree producer. By the time "The Montana Christmas Tree Story" was published this fall, however, the business had long since folded and was in danger of being forgotten entirely.

"The wild Doug fir business, when Northwest Montana was really called the Christmas tree capital of the world, that was going to be lost. Really, nobody else was probably going to write that story," Flanagan said. "I just felt like I kind of owed it to the people to write that story."

It was in Eureka that Montana Christmas trees first received national attention.

According to Flanagan, the area's relatively dry climate and short frost-free season created dense foliage. Autumn's hard frosts set the needles so they didn't shed as quickly as did needles from trees from other parts of the country. This made Tobacco Valley trees ideal for shipping.

"Eureka used to be the Christmas tree capital of the world," Fincher said. "It was all wild trees, all Douglas fir, shipped everywhere - California and all over the country."

The first trees were cut and shipped from Montana in 1924. In 1936, 1.2 million trees were shipped from the state. Five years later, that number more than doubled, exceeding 3 million trees.

The industry was largely unregulated until the late '50s and early '60s, when people worried that subpar trees were giving Montana businesses a bad reputation. To combat the negative image, Montana growers had to produce higher-quality trees.

But in the mid-'60s, wild Doug firs began to fall out of favor as consumers sought fuller, more symmetrical trees. Artificial trees, which had been on the market for a number of years, contributed to this ideal, as did plantations, which were becoming increasingly popular - even in Northwest Montana.

"In the late '60s and early '70s in the Flathead Valley is when the plantation trees then came in," Fincher said. "The advantage of the plantation tree, of course, is it's easier to harvest and to grow. The tree was a lot more uniform, and it was fuller.

"People started growing plantation trees, and the tree that was the favored tree for many years was the Scotch pine."

This was good news for Flathead farmers; the tree thrived in the valley's sandy soils and moderate climate. The Scotch pine market took off in the 1970s, right around the time Fincher's parents purchased 120 acres east of Kalispell. They harvested their first trees in 1975.

"And the thing that was nice about it was you could make a good living on the least amount of land," he said. "You didn't have to have a big farm. You just had to wait seven years before your first harvest."

Growers found a ripe market north of the border, Fincher said, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan. He estimates that each year, Flathead farmers produced between half a million and a million Christmas trees and sold about a quarter million. This lasted until the 1990s, when nearly all of Northwest Montana's Christmas tree operations were dealt their death blows.

"'94 was the pivotal year for us up here," Flanagan said. "It was a little later down there. But the markets were already dying."

Dying, but not dead. Even as late as 1992, his family cut about 15,000 trees a year.

But that year, needlecast diseases struck the Tobacco Valley's wild Douglas firs. Meanwhile, plantations, many of them located near large cities, continued to flourish. The high cost of transportation further compounded the problem for Montana trees, located miles from a major market.

The nearest market collapsed, which hurt Flathead farmers, Fincher said.

"The main demise of the tree business was when the Canadian market went south in the '90s," he said, explaining that Canadian currency depreciated until it reached about 30 cents on the dollar.

"American trees became so expensive that they [Montana growers] couldn't compete with the trees that were coming all the way over from Ontario, even some from British Columbia. They were paying the freight to ship trees all the way from Ontario all the way to, let's say, Calgary or Edmonton, cheaper than they could buy them from us."

At the same time the Canadian market was falling apart, competition from the Pacific Northwest was on the rise. With a mild climate and 40 inches of rain each year, Oregon and Washington rapidly became two of the country's top-producing Christmas tree states.

"They could get to market in four years versus seven years for trees in the valley. They started to encroach upon our markets because we started to have a lot easier winters," Fincher said. "All the needles [on Montana trees] would drop off because the needles wouldn't have been set by a cold frost."

And like growers in the Tobacco Valley, Flathead farmers suffered from a changing consumer mindset.

"Another thing that probably drove the market stuff was that after so many years of Scotch pine being the favorite tree, people started saying, 'I just don't want to buy a Scotch pine this year,'" Fincher said.

Such factors were beyond growers' control, but Flathead tree farmers contributed to their own downfall.

"They way overplanted for the amount of market they had," Fincher said. "As a result, probably between 1995 and 2000 they probably burned somewhere around a half million trees in this valley - at the least, at the very least."

While some, including Flanagan, cite artificial trees' increased popularity as another factor in the industry's demise, Fincher insists this is not the case.

"People buy a plastic tree, and after two or three years, it looks ratty," he said. "So they go out and buy another, a real tree."

With the industry in shambles and property values skyrocketing as people moved to the area in droves, some growers found their land repurposed. Many Bigfork farmers with trees on leased property watched their crops plowed up to make way for something more profitable.

"A lot of the ones that didn't survive when the crunch hit was the people that had trees on leased ground," Fincher said. "Those that had their own farm and their own equipment, they're the ones that survived."

Survivors are rare, however. Fincher estimates there were 10 to 15 major growers in the valley in 1989. Today, he can only name a few.

Until recently, his family was among them.

"We were basically in the business for about, oh, 25 years," he said. "My mother and I sold our last Christmas tree in about 2001, 2002."

He attributes much of their longevity to his father's careful planning.

"One of the things that saved my father is he planted landscaping trees also," he said. "He didn't hedge his bet and put everything on Christmas trees."

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.