Roberta McKern
In our last article we began following the memories of Lynn Rice as he focused on recalling sawmills in the East Linn area in a 2005 interview.
Two volunteers from the Museum had been told to contact Lynn if they wanted to find out about sawmills from the old days.
In calling up the past, he began recollecting his own experiences, to our good fortune. He gave us cherished glimpses of the past we would otherwise miss.
When we left him last, he had been working for Stu Weise and the Westgate Lumber Company, but the 1950s had begun and Lynn was about to move to the Clear Lumber Company. The two lumber companies had much in common. They were smaller outfits which depended a lot on ingenuity.
At the end of the 2005 interview Lynn looked back and summed up his experiences, recounting, “I done it all in the saw mill. I ran planers for quite awhile. I mill wrighted. I cut. I built a big sled and put an unloading rig on it and dumped logs into the pond. I ran cat–drove caterpillar.”
This reminded him of a cat from his earlier days: “An old caterpillar tractor bought at a sale. It had a big four cylinder motor in it you cranked with a jump bar and a fly wheel and had extended track, a wide track, a 13-foot blade on it.
“Well, it was a very good rig if you knew how to run it.”
Which sounds much like the sawmills Lynn worked in and he knew how to run them, although things did not always go out smoothly as he learned when he worked for Amos Horner, founder of the Clear Lumber Mill. When Lynn began working with Amos Horner it was in moving out chunks of timber from a cut over area on Moyer Mountain up the Calapooia River.
Back when the Oregon Electric Railroad ran a spur to Dollar Camp in the early 1930s, Woodard of the Railroad, so identified by Lynn, had logged on Moyer Mountain in the manner of cut and get out. The damaged logs were simply abandoned, leaving wood good for lumber behind.
As an entrepreneur, Amos Horner depended on ingenuity which Lynn had plenty of. In 1950 Horner developed the first Clear Lumber Mill in the Fairview area. Across the way, a second mill went out of business, perhaps burned, and again salvaging good timber, Horner bought up the logs left in the mill pond. Creative skills came into play.
To get the logs from one mill pond to another, Lynn and the others dug a canal, built a couple of little rowboats and put a bridge over the road.
Two or three logs could be towed down to the bridge and released while Horner jumped out of the boat and passed to the other side on the bridge to the second boat to continue steering the logs on course. (Is this how it worked? Maybe.)
As Lynn recalled, at the Fairview Mill they built the first one-man head rig on which he did everything, including dogging the logs and setting the ratchets to cut eight foot two by fours.
As we’ve seen, generally, sawyers and ratchet setters worked in tandem. The man doing the ratchets followed signals from the sawyer.
When he heard Lynn was sawing and setting the ratchets, “That can’t be done,” a Santiam Lumber Company man said. He showed up to watch Lynn at work.
“I can’t believe it, I didn’t think it was possible,” he had to admit.
But this one man-show got Lynn into trouble with Amos Horner. One night Lynn had a breakdown. He generally worked a six-day week and he was ready to go home, so he figured on coming back and fixing things later. When he walked into the office he encountered Horner.
“I guess you’re through,” Lynn was told.
“What was the problem?” Lynn wanted to know.
“You’re not doing what you’re paid to do,” Amos insisted.
“I guess that’s OK,” Lynn admitted, “I’ve got to call Canada, get hold of the engineer up there and tell him if anything goes wrong with this gang mill anymore he’ll be dealing with someone else and it won’t be me.”
And so Lynn was fired from Clear Lumber Company. However, Jim Stock had bought into the company and he went on to buy Amos Horner out. He was not as ready as Horner had been to lose Lynn as a good employee.
He asked Lynn to return. Horner went off to found another mill and Lynn noted that he and Amos remained good friends but he never worked for Amos again.
Lynn would work 26 years with Clear Lumber until his retirement at 65 in 1975. Working there, too, were his brothers Bud and Dick. The three brothers can be seen in a picture with Jim Stock in the Genealogy Society’s book, “Sweet Home, a History in Pictures.”
In 1975 The New Era reported that the Rice brothers had put in a combined 114 years of work in the wood products industry.
Stock declared the three’s success lay in their creative imaginations and their unique ability to design and build machinery and make it work. And Jim Stock knew because he and Lynn had designed and built the Clear Lumber sawmill near Foster depicted in the book’s photographs.
In the Museum’s interview, Lynn Rice recollected how that mill came into being. It started with an ad in the Oregonian newspaper noticed by Jim Stock.
During the War, a man named Lewis had bought property and built a pond with the idea of reloading logs and selling them, but the War ended his profitable dream. So here was a site with a pond setting along the railroad near Foster.
Jim Stock looked the place over and told Lynn, “Boy, that’s a cracker jack of a place to build a good sawmill.” With regret, he added, “But I can‘t afford $32,000.”
“Well,” Lynn said, “Why don’t you use a little strategy. Have Andy (the book keeper) write him a letter. Offer him $5,000 cash to take it off his hands.”
“He wouldn’t even listen,” Stock said, downcast.
“I don’t care if he listens or not. See what happens,” Lynn urged. ( In the Genealogy’s book the owner of the property is listed as having been A.K. Wilson’s reload, perhaps before it became Lewis’s property).
At any rate, time passed until one day Jim Stock got a telephone call from Florida. Lewis was going to be in the Sweet Home area. Perhaps he and Stock could discuss the Foster site. And so, according to Lynn, Jim Stock went off riding in a chauffeured limousine while he and Mr. Lewis talked over the price of the mill site.
“Don’t give in,” Lynn had urged Stock, “or you won’t get anywhere.” The wrangling continued over coffee at lunch and finally into the evening at Jim Stock’s house. At 9 o’clock Jim Stock said he’d split the difference. He upped his offer to $7,500.
Mr. Lewis asked his chauffeur, “What would you do if you were me?” The weary driver replied, “Take the $7,500 so we can go home.”
With Lynn’s guidance, the old Clear Lumber Mill had not been doing badly, but the new mill would be the hallmark of his career as he both helped design and build it. At one point he asked Jim Stock, “Do you want to build a round roof?” They had a lot of 1x4s and 1x6s.
“Do you think you can do that?” Stock inquired.
“Well, sure.”
Not only did Lynn build a round roof, he built three after designing a jig.
When he looked back, Lynn had one regret about the roof. He wished he’d put another brace in the middle which sagged a little.
Motors from the Fairview mill were moved over to the new Foster enterprise. As Lynn related, a lot of mill machinery was reused.
Jim Stock had a “bone pile” down on his property where gravel had been taken out by Knife River. In it were all sorts of machineries and pieces of machinery acquired from various sales from other times mills retooled or went out of business. A mill could go broke, but its machines still meant something.