In the 1800s, Albert County was an ideal location to harvest timber. Demand for timber grew to the point that the 1851 census for Albert County recorded 97 sawmills operating in the County. Many of these mills were smaller operations with wood being cut in a mile or two radius around the sawmill. Some of these mills sawed anywhere from 5 to 6 million board feet per year, compared to the smaller mills in the area which generally sawed a few hundred thousand board feet per year. Because of this, accurate conversion and measurement was important for these mills, so lumber conversion charts, such as this one, and measuring sticks are common remnants of the once burgeoning lumber industry in Albert County.
The end of the era of wooden ships during the early twentieth century, however, greatly reduced the demand for timber. At the same time, the large lumber companies, rather than modernizing timber operations to harvest smaller trees or to harvest timber farther away from the mills, instead shifted operations to the untouched timber lands of Northwestern North America.