The Licking River Lumber and Mining Company

The Licking River Lumber and Mining Company has been brought to the notice of many of our readers this winter on account of its being involved in legislative discussions.  A strong effort was made at Frankfort to take away some of its peculiar privileges, but it was unsuccessful.  A lumber man explained it to us, recently, as follows: “The company had money to spend and the mountain folks had none, and you could see in two hours just how the thing was going.”  

The company certainly enjoys very strange privileges buy its charter.  For years it has been the custom of the people of the mountains to build rafts of logs, loading on them perhaps some tobacco and furs, and hoop-poles, and coming down when the river was up, to exchange their merchandise for city supplies.  But this is all cut off by the boom which the lumber company has been allowed to throw across the river to stop their logs.  The mountaineers claim that it was wrong to give up to a company the control of a free river, but they were defeated, and now they must sell their logs to the lumber company, or let them stand in the woods, while their market for other productions is almost entirely cut off. 

From the Covington newspaper The Ticket, of March 23, 1876