Five native trees, all dipterocarps (tropical trees belonging to the family Dipterocarpaceae), were of principal interest to the lumbermen for their commercial potential: apitong (Dipterocarpus grandiflorus), almon (Shorea almon), tanguile (Shorea polysperma), red lauan (Shorea negrosensis), and white lauan (Shorea contorta).
Many of them were old and had grown to be gigantic specimens; red lauan trees towering 200 feet into the air were “not uncommon,” according to the bureau report.
Yet the American lumbermen struggled to find “a market for such varieties,” says scholar Brendan Luyt, because they did not quite know what to make of these exotic creatures. In addition, consumer uncertainty over their quality presented another problem. When wood from such trees did sell, profits were smaller compared to “the more widely known and valuable woods,” Luyt explains. Those “were of course charged at a higher rate than those less well known.”
The lumbermen scrambled for a solution to make Negros lumber more desirable. They devised a marketing plan engineered to make these alien arbors more familiar to would-be consumers. The short of it entailed misidentifying the trees by assigning them a common trade label which they then prefixed with their place of origin, as some sort of consolation.
These trees were sold as Philippine mahogany.
Grafting Wrong Labels
The decision to classify, or falsify, the trees as “mahogany” was informed by a long established Anglo commercial preference for, and industrial familiarity with, the woods of the genus Swietenia, the genuine mahogany (Swietenia belongs to the plant family Meliaceae). American forestry expert Frank Bruce Lamb explains that for “English and American lumber merchants, ship builders, furniture manufacturers and dealers, architects and antique furniture dealers,” wood derived from Swietenia trees “has been, since as early as 1700, and still is regarded as a standard of excellence.”
The term Philippine mahogany soon began appearing in newspapers and magazines. “The texture of Philippine mahogany,” asserted the author of a 1916 article in The Furniture Manufacturer and Artisan, “is practically identical with African mahogany, being, if anything, more easily worked than the latter.” However positive this pronouncement, the very same journal had reported a year earlier on its dismal performance in the marketplace, noting “the Philippine woods have not found much sale in the United States.”