One of Minnesota's first major industries began here on August 24, 1839, when the Marine Lumber Company's slow up-and-down saw cut the state's first commercial lumber from trees felled in the white pine forests of the St. Croix Valley. The mill was built by settlers from Marine, Illinois, at a site chosen a year earlier by David Hone and Lewis S. Judd. During the winter of 1839-40, it produced about 5,000 board feet of lumber a day. From this modest start, the much rebuilt and enlarged mill of the Walker, Judd and Veazie Lumber Company was by 1877 producing two million board feet of lumber, 500,000 shingles, and 200,000 laths a year with an average daily work crew of fourteen men. Financial depression, a huge log jam that kept logs from reaching the mill, extensive tornado damage, and a low-water summer combined to bring failure in 1885. After a few years of intermittent operation under other companies, the mill closed permanently by 1895, and its extensive frame buildings were torn down, leaving only the ruins of the enginehouse as a reminder of Minnesota's pine forests and the lumber industry that built the towns and cities of an expanding nineteenth-century mid-America.