Jeff Moore Livres

In 1922, the US Forest Service offered one of the largest timber sales in the agency's history, encompassing 890 million board feet of mostly Ponderosa pine timber in the mountains north of Burns, Oregon. Among other requirements, the sale terms required the successful bidder to build and operate 80 miles of common carrier railroad through some of the most remote and undeveloped country in the state. The Fred Herrick Lumber Company and its Malheur Railroad initially won the bidding, only to lose it when a crash in the lumber market forced the company into insolvency. The Edward Hines Lumber Company of Chicago picked up the pieces, and from 1929 until 1984, its subsidiary Oregon & Northwestern Railroad made a living hauling logs, lumber, and occasional livestock between Burns and Seneca, Oregon.

Timber has always been one of the principle industries in the United States. The tasks and technologies associated with logging trees, hauling them to sawmills and other forest product plants, processing them into useable products, and then moving those to market always have left substantial marks on both history and the landscape. Yet the industry has never been static, and changing economics, technologies, social pressures, and other forces have left many traces of the past as the new replaced the old, as plants opened and closed, and as values and philosophies shifted.The ghosts of the timber industry come in many forms, such as abandoned sawmill sites, stumps in the forest, static displays in city parks and museums, tourist attractions, and geographic place names. Taken together, they tell the story of a way of life that, while it continues today, has radically changed from the old ways. This book seeks to present a few snapshot views of some of these remnants in the Pacific Coast states, explaining their role both in history and in the present.