Yesterday one of my sisters told me a lumber mill in Susanville burned down. After looking into the news of Susanville I found out it was the "old and historical" Eagle Lake lumber mill, as stated in the news article, which brought back a few old memories of days gone by as described below.
During my first year of attending Lassen College in Susanville, California in the fall of 1968, I lived just up the street from the Eagle Lake sawmill. Log trucks arrived in the early morning and throughout the day to have their loads dumped in the log pond. The mill was operated by steam and electrical power. I remember hearing the steam whistle blow whenever their was a shift change or lunch break. The sound of saws and the clanging of equipment was part of the environment. Most of the finished lumber was hauled away by train going south toward Reno. It was my first exposure to a working saw mill and a community dependent on logging and milling. There was one other mill south of town called the Susan River Lumber Company. After graduating in 1970 with a AA degree in technical forestry I worked for the Forest Service in timber management starting in silviculture, timber sale preparation and administration from 1971 to 1977 at Orleans, California.
In 1977, I transferred from the Orleans Ranger District on the Six Rivers National Forest to the Greenville Ranger District on the Plumas National Forest as a timber sale contract administrator. It was here that I learned the Eagle Lake sawmill was now owned and operated by Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI). I was familiar with SPI when I worked at Orleans administering timber sales purchased by SPI as they were bidding up timber sales to feed their sawmill near Arcata. Most of the logs from timber sales on the Greenville District either went to the two Louisiana Pacific mills near Greenville or to the big Diamond International mill in Red Bluff or to the two mills in Susanville. For accountability purposes it was required that log loads have assigned brands on each log end with a spot of yellow paint for export control and a Forest Service load receipt stapled to the load. This receipt showed a receipt number, the date, the timber sale name, assigned log brand and number of logs loaded on the truck. These receipts were usually filled out by the log loader operator or other authorized person and stapled to the front of the load. Receipt stubs remained in the book and were returned to the Forest Service. Sale administrators or their inspectors were required to follow a loaded log truck once a week to the mill to check that the number of logs loaded were delivered to the mill and not removed elsewhere. Even people working for the mills would sometimes check their truckers for log accountability. SPI had a timber sale on the Greenville District where they had completed road construction and contracted to an independent trucker to haul the decked right-of-way (R/W) logs to the mill. He was given a branding hammer and load receipts by SPI to be attached to his loads. Since I had the closet operating sale in that area, I would occasionally check on the removal of these R/W logs. Sometimes there was only the loader near a deck of logs and I noticed logs in the deck were branded and painted. On one occasion I saw the log truck loaded as the driver was putting cable binders around the load. I asked to see the load receipt and he told me the book of receipts were in the truck and he would fill it out when he got to the mill as he told me he did have the time to do it now. This was reported to my supervisor and the SPI logging manager, who immediately fired the trucker. Later we learned he had been hauling his loads across private timber land owned by the Shasta Forest Company without a permit and their local forester put a stop to him hauling over their road.
All this makes me think back 57 years ago when I lived near this mill now called "old and historical"--makes me think-- I must be getting old and historical or what?