Georgia-Pacific: Plywood’s Southern Yellow Revolution By K. Brad Barfield In the early 1960s, the American forest products industry was defined by a rigid geographical monopoly. Softwood plywood production belonged almost entirely to the Pacific Northwest, where vast Douglas fir forests fed a mature, technologically stable manufacturing system. To the rest of the country—especially the South—plywood was an expensive, imported commodity. Freight from Oregon and Washington added such cost that Sou

The History of Boulder County Rests Here: John D. Slye John D. Slye was born on March 27, 1885, in Manchester, Iowa, to Luman and Elizabeth Jane Williamson Schley. When he and his siblings were children, the family moved to Boulder, Colorado. At about that same time, the family changed the spelling of their name to be more American, but the pronunciation remained the same. Luman and Elizabeth spent the rest of their lives in Boulder and are buried together in Green Mountain Cemetery. After compl

Georgia-Pacific: Plywood’s Southern Yellow Revolution By K. Brad Barfield In the early 1960s, America’s plywood industry was geographically fixed in place. The Pacific Northwest—home to the towering Douglas fir—held a near-total monopoly on softwood plywood, and most experts believed it would stay that way forever. Southern Yellow Pine, the dominant species of the American South, was viewed as unworkable: too dense, too resinous, too unpredictable to peel into veneer. And yet, in that moment of