George W. Hotchkiss

George Woodward Hotchkiss (October 16, 1831 – March 1, 1926) was an American nineteenth-century businessman and journalist who wrote about the lumber industry. He was co-founder and editor of several newspapers, including what the Journal of Forest History has considered to be North America's first lumber newspaper, Lumberman's Gazette. He contributed to the publication of a manual on the timber trade, which sold 40,000 copies. In 1898 he published the book History of the Lumber and Forest Industry of the Northwest. In the view of one 1920s author, Hotchkiss was the "father" of lumber periodicals.

Hotchkiss was one of the Californian "forty-niners" who prospected for gold. At the age of 18, he made the 154-day sailing trip around the southern tip of South America to get to California, and by his own account opened the first trading post in Sacramento County, California. He was one of the signatories of the petition for California state status. Later during his life, he was an alderman and town supervisor in Bay City, Michigan, as well as a supervisor and a justice of the peace in Evanston, Illinois. At the time of his death in 1926, a newspaper reported that he was the last of forty-niners alive.

One modern scholar assessing Hotchkiss's 1898 work calls it "a classic history of lumbering in the Midwest", while another, in a survey of sources on the history of the lumber industry, says that it "is full of detail, but disjointed" and not as valuable as studies published in the mid-20th century and later.