Lavinia takes over the company and moves its operations to Chicago

Lavinia takes over the company and moves its operations to Chicago at a moment when inherited authority, personal loss, and commercial ambition converge. After James’s death leaves her responsible for Duke & Sons, she establishes herself as its head, reshapes its leadership, and relocates its center of business. The transition is more than a change of address: it sets the company on a path toward corporate organization, wider control of production and transport, and rapid expansion, while revealing how readily Lavinia’s search for security becomes an appetite for accumulation.

Taking Command

In the days after she has written to Andre Roque and received no answer, Lavinia throws herself into the company’s work. The delay makes her fret, and it is increasingly clear that she cannot manage Duke & Sons alone. She turns to Edward Pye, the company’s accountant, treasurer, and paymaster, who introduces her to Chicago lawyer Clayton Jasper Flense. Flense quickly becomes indispensable, advising her to move the company to Chicago and incorporate it with a board of directors. His advice joins practical reorganization to a new legal form: incorporation, he explains, would separate the corporation from individual liability and help raise capital for extensive woodland purchases.

The proposal conflicts with the warnings Lavinia remembers from her father, who regarded corporations as potentially monopolistic and dangerous to partnerships and sole proprietorships. Flense answers by distinguishing American corporations from the royal-chartered East India Company and by arguing that competition can check corporate power. Lavinia comes to see the advice as a plan for reshaping Duke & Sons. Her decision develops as both a commercial calculation and a response to vulnerability: she has begun to believe that money is the only reliable protection, and the company offers a means of building that protection on a much larger scale.

Authority and Relocation

Cyrus enters the office smoking one of James’s cigars, taken from James’s desk after the funeral, and challenges Lavinia’s authority to hire a woman. She answers that the other board members have died and declares herself head of Duke & Sons and heir to James’s estate and business interests. When she tells Cyrus it would be better for him to leave, he surprises her by agreeing that the time has come for a change. He wants to establish his own lumber brokerage, while hoping Duke & Sons will become its leading client.

Lavinia makes the transfer concrete: she intends to move the company to Chicago and rename it Duke Logging and Lumber, since there are no longer any sons. She explains her reasoning in writing before shouting it into Cyrus’s partly deaf ear. Detroit has been outgrown; Chicago sits nearer the country’s commercial center, with forests, lakes, and rivers supporting the movement of logs. Railroads and the Illinois and Michigan Canal connect routes that rivers alone cannot serve, while the direction of trade is shifting from north–south to east–west. The written note is a practical accommodation to Cyrus’s hearing, but it also condenses her case into a concise map of transport, geography, and growth.

Cyrus recognizes the force of her argument and decides to move his own enterprise to Chicago. Lavinia asks him to step away formally at a board meeting while remaining on the board, and she raises the prospect of incorporation. Her handling of the separation is calculated rather than purely dismissive: she wants Cyrus to launch his brokerage without acrimony and asks whether the Breitsprechers are among his clients. The company’s move therefore reorganizes relationships as well as location, turning an internal succession dispute into a new arrangement of business roles.

Building a Larger Operation

Once in Chicago, Lavinia and her advisers address the limits of the company’s existing organization. The Breitsprechers are buying large tracts on credit and pulling ahead, while Duke & Sons needs more landlookers and someone to take over Lennart Vogel’s former role. Lavinia acknowledges that she cannot simultaneously run the company and supervise its landlookers, jobbers, and mills. Flense recommends Noah Ludlum, an experienced Maine operator who can choose capable people and manage work even though epilepsy prevents him from serving as a logging contractor in the woods.

Transport and production become central to Lavinia’s plans. She asks whether the company should oversee its own rafts, barges, wagons, railcars, and ships. Flense urges her to build ships and barges to cut out intermediaries. He and Pye also recommend replacing jobbers with company-employed crews and salaried camp overseers. Pye proposes company stores in logging camps, stocked with workers’ necessities and priced to return part of the wages the company pays. Lavinia understands the financial logic plainly: keep wages low and sell supplies at the highest prices workers can bear. Remote camps might find the stores useful, but the arrangement also gives the company greater control over workers’ pay and spending.

Lavinia considers railways as a way to free the business from dependence on river access. A short-line railway from cutting sites to mills could make distant timber commercially reachable; she also envisages milling lumber on site and sending seasoned product to market by rail. She weighs the expense against the value of opening timber otherwise judged too troublesome to cut. Her attention broadens beyond pine as well. Although James had planned to dispose of the nearly exhausted Maine white-pine land, she wonders whether spruce, hemlock, beech, maple, walnut, and oak might find markets, and notes that Michigan holds more tree species than pine. The company’s new reach is thus technological and commercial: infrastructure would extend access, while new markets could make previously overlooked woods valuable.

Chicago, Wealth, and the Forest

Flense urges Lavinia to buy Chicago property and hold it as the city grows. He contrasts the former price of a central acre with the rising value of downtown lots and argues that urban land could yield wealth without further work beyond the initial purchase. Lavinia listens while recognizing that much of the company’s capital is tied up in forestland. Her strategy is to use the timber business to build a protective reserve and to treat property itself as another accumulating asset.

Within ten years, Duke Logging and Lumber has a general manager and assistants, a sales manager, dozens of landlookers, thirty logging camps, forest railways and a steam locomotive named James, barges and ships, sawmills and finishing mills, and two furniture mills using hardwoods. It also owns choice Chicago lots and blocks. The growth makes visible the consequences of the move: the company no longer depends on the former, narrower arrangement of land acquisition and river transport but coordinates camps, mills, shipping, rail, sales, and property. Two lots Lavinia buys for twelve thousand dollars each rise in estimated value to more than twenty thousand apiece within six months. As Chicago’s population surges from twenty thousand to nearly one hundred thousand, she continues buying land.

Expansion carries a cost that the company’s public image obscures. Lavinia cultivates newspapermen who portray the firm as philanthropic and morally distinguished, and herself as a progressive businesswoman. Small civic contributions, including a bandstand and fireworks, help generate favorable coverage. She also promotes an image of loggers as heroic, resilient men, encouraging them to see extreme risk and hardship as proof of toughness. The account links this image-making to the company’s ability to mobilize labor and frontier settlement: pride in supposed invulnerability helps normalize dangerous work and continued extraction.

The Long View and Its Limits

The company’s expansion belongs to a longer history of treating forests as an apparently inexhaustible source of wealth. Earlier, Charles Duquet had rejected beaver and other living resources as vulnerable to disappearance and unstable markets, settling on timber as the supposedly lasting commodity that Europe lacked. His plan—to profit first from furs, then move into wood—anticipates the industrial logic that later drives the Duke enterprise. In New Zealand, logging stations and trading posts pursue flax, spars, and timber, strip valuable shore forests, and move on, leaving burned waste behind. In Michigan, James Duke responds to a great stand of pine with the expectation that a thousand men could not cut it in a thousand years. Armenius Breitsprecher sees the danger in that hunger: he fears clear-cutting, wasted wood, damaged soil, and the assumption that another forest will always be waiting.

Lavinia’s Chicago program therefore stands within a recurring contrast between commercial growth and the time required for forests to regenerate. Later, after her marriage to Dieter Breitsprecher, he argues for a separate Maintenance Timberland division to retain and manage cutover pine lands, while Lavinia continues to control the enterprise. His policy introduces conservation into the company’s reputation and asks the board to think in decades rather than months. Dieter’s faith in planting seedlings for people not yet born offers a different scale of responsibility from the rapid appreciation of Chicago property or the drive to extend logging into new territory. The move to Chicago is decisive because it gives Duke & Sons the organizational and financial means to become larger, but the novel also makes that success inseparable from the question of what expansion consumes and whether future forests can be made part of the business’s plans.