George Woodward Hotchkiss (October 16, 1831 – March 1, 1926) was an American nineteenth-century businessman and journalist who wrote about the lumber industry.

Hotchkiss was of English and Welsh ancestry; his ancestors were Huguenots who emigrated to Switzerland and from there went with the Plymouth colony to America, settling at Guilford, Connecticut.

[9] The 154-day sailing trip from the east coast involved going around Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet.

[10] Hotchkiss in his own 1898 book History of the Lumber and Forest Industry of the Northwest gives a autobiographical account of his life in the 1850s.

The investment did not pay out and in early 1851 he went to Port Dover, Ontario, Canada, where he joined his brother-in-law Henry Wheeler as a lumber dealer serving the Albany, New York, market.

He then took a job as the manager for a Buffalo-based company that had a barge line on the Great Lakes that operated to Saginaw, Michigan.

[4] The firm out of Buffalo was Noyes & Reed, which had three rebuilt steamboats in its fleet of barges, which were used for hauling large quantities of lumber.

[11] Railroad lines were soon built on the south side of Lake Erie; they took all of the lumber traffic and barges were no longer needed.

[4] In 1866, Hotchkiss's company contracted to build a 17-mile (27 km) plank road from Bay City to Midland, Michigan.

The loss of two rafts of logs on Saginaw Bay and bad weather caused the company to go bankrupt.

[11] Hotchkiss then established a sawmill and surrounding village in northern Michigan, but it was subsequently destroyed by a fire in 1874.

[4] In 1869, between some of his business efforts with lumber,[4] Hotchkiss took employment at the editorial department of the Saginaw Daily Courier, which was his first job in journalism.

[15]) The Lumberman's Exchange of Chicago, an influential group in the industry, elected Hotchkiss to the position of executive secretary in 1881, a post that he held until 1887.

A Jeffersonian Democrat throughout his life, during the 1890s he was elected as both a supervisor and a justice of the peace in Evanston, which at the time was a town dominated by the Republican Party.