1.. Coote and Weinert's Sawmill

Part IV. October 11, 1991 Interview

[interview with Neil Vanderburg, conducted at his home in Independence, Oregon, on

George Wisner: October 11, 1991 by George Wisner.]

1. Coote and Weinert's Sawmill

George Wisner: Neil when did you first go to work for them [Bill Coote and Cljfford CornuttJ?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, let's put it this way, I went to work for them when I was about 14 which would have been 1937.

George Wisner: What mill did you go to work for?

Neil Vanderburg: That was up at the last mill [Coote and Weinert. Stop # ..].

George Wisner: That would be on the east [south] side of the [Smith] hill there as opposed to Berry Creek- Savage Creek, whatever.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. The first mill was actually on Savage Creek, the first two were.

George Wisner: The first two were there and you worked on the other.

Neil Vanderburg: I worked up on top of the hill there.

George Wisner: That is the one I am in reference to. Now you went to work there in 1932?

Neil Vanderburg: No, 1937 or '38, right in there.

George Wisner: Ok, what did you do for them?

Neil Vanderburg: Actually I fed the planer. I don't even know if they had a planer when Weinert took it over.

George Wisner: The mill was still owned by who at that time?

Neil Vanderburg: I worked for Bill Coote.

George Wisner: Bill Coote. What was Bill Coote like?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, Bill Coote lived right across the street from us.

George Wisner: When you say he lived across the street from us, what do you mean?

Neil Vanderburg: You mean where did we live?

George Wisner: Yeah.

Neil Vanderburg: Ok, we lived coming down into Berry Creek from the north right at the bottom of the hill there. There is still a house there. Across the street, is the old Joe Smith house and he rented the Joe Smith house.

George Wisner: Ok, he lived out across the street from you?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. The Joe Smith house is still there. Our house was moved by the government when Camp Adair came in.

George Wisner: Ok, what was your house like, was it a single story?

Neil Vanderburg: It was a wood frame, it was a five-bedroom home, 2-story, we had a full width front porch and back porch. Bob Zybach has got a picture of it.

George Wisner: He does, ok. Was the color white?

Neil Vanderburg: I am not sure what color it was. You know that was about fifty years ago.

George Wisner: 1 can believe that. How did you come to go to work for Bill Coote?

Neil Vanderburg: Because he was my neighbor across the street. Actually I was way below legal age to go to work. But one day somebody didn't show up for work, so he came down and asked me if I would go to work for him. I didn't ever have a real permanent job. He

Neil Vanderburg: would come and get me when he needed extra help cuz I was a pretty husky boy then, I probably weighed about 170 pounds then.

George Wisner: What was Bill like, can you kind of tell me a little bit about him?

Neil Vanderburg: Bill was a machinist really, and a mechanic. For my part, I think he was a pretty smart man along those lines.

George Wisner: Did he operate the mill by himself?

Neil Vanderburg: Well he started out, now we are starting out in the middle of the story actually. But he started out with his brother-in-law, his last name was Cornutt, and the first two mills were Coote-Cornutt mills. They were brother-in-laws and his mother-in-law apparently had the money that set them up.

George Wisner: Did he have any brothers or anything?

Neil Vanderburg: Not as far as I know. He was always pretty poor. I remember one time ... the policeman came out there to their house to pick him up because he wrote a rubber check for a license for his car. [He had a brother, Alfred; sister, Gertrude.]

George Wisner: Okay.

Neil Vanderburg: So many a time I knew him he wasn't all that wealthy. When he paid you he told you to hold it 'til Tuesday or whatever and that is kind of the way it went.

George Wisner: Okay, so cash flow wasn't all that great then?

Neil Vanderburg: No. But he was always happy. My dad had a couple of 24 inch pipe wrenches and he traded him 2,000 board feet of I x 6's for fence for those two pipe wrenches. My dad traded him on the basis of he could you use them any time he wanted to.

George Wisner: Did Bill Coote own that land that he was logging on?

Neil Vanderburg: I would doubt it, but I wouldn't know. You have to realize that I was just a young teenager then and basically I did more playing around than anything than I did working around the mill. See when I first came into the country I was still in grade school.

George Wisner: How long did you work for him?

Neil Vanderburg: Basically over a period of a couple of years but probably not over fifteen days.

George Wisner: What did they cut at that mill?

Neil Vanderburg: Railroad ties. We call all those mills in there tie mills. They would peel a fairly thick slab off of each side.

George Wisner: Was this strictly railroad ties?

Neil Vanderburg: No. I'm just starting to say they were peeler, fairly heavy slab off. They sold the slab for slab wood and most of them were hauled into Salem for furnace wood and stuff like that.

George Wisner: Slab wood was used for furnace wood?

Neil Vanderburg: It was used for heat, yes. Banks used it and homes used it and so forth. Then after they took the slabs off of it then they would get one or two inch boards off the sides. At that time the railroad required a heart in a tie so this was ideal for what they call the tie mill because you take small log and you take a few 2 inch Cuts off it and then you have your tie.

George Wisner: How did they log it?

Neil Vanderburg: Teams of horses.

George Wisner: How many teams of horses did they have?

Neil Vanderburg: I think there was three teams. They only used two teams, or two horses to pull a log.

George Wisner: There was three teams of two horses roughly?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah

George Wisner: Where did those horses come from?

Neil Vanderburg: Farmers.

George Wisner: All over the area or one particular farmer?

Neil Vanderburg: Pretty much all over as far as I know. I know Forrest Tandy had a team up there. I think the Dickeys had a team up there.

George Wisner: Mr. [Tom] Stephenson said something about a guy who had horses at the mill who would go to a firm up on the hill.

Neil Vanderburg: 1 never worked in the logging.

George Wisner: How did they cut the timber?

Neil Vanderburg: With a Swede fiddle [crosscut saw].

George Wisner: Two-man buck saw?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. You were falling with a two-man buck saw but you didn't cut them up with a two-man buck saw. It was the same saw, it was a quicker saw, the same length, but only one man ran it.

George Wisner: How many men worked at that site out there as you recall?

Neil Vanderburg: In the mill where I worked there would be. There was a pond monkey, and he pulled the logs up into the mill. You had your sawyer who was the guy that decided how the log was going to cut. Then you had your ratchet setter that set the depth of the cuts. The 2 inch stuff dropped into an edger, which made 2x4's, 2x6's or whatever out of it.

George Wisner: The edger operator, was he a special person, a separate edger operator?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: Did you have anybody there to fire the boiler?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: Okay, that's what Stephenson said he did. He was a boiler firer he said.

Neil Vanderburg: He would know more about that than I would. But when they built that mill up there at first we had an old steam tractor that they ran it with.

George Wisner: Are we talking the same site or are you over on the Savage Creek sites?

Neil Vanderburg: The same site.

George Wisner: Same site. Can you tell me a little bit about how that operated, type of machinery they had there like that?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, now I wasn't there when they moved that steam tractor from down on the bottom of the hill up. But Clifford Cornutt was my best friend, and he told me about them guiding that tractor up there, up the hill. They did it just in the late evening and that was before that road went through that you can now drive on. There was no road up there at that time. He said that when they ran that tractor up there at it was dark. He says you could see fire from that thing all over, fire and steam, going up that hill

George Wisner: What time of year did they move it?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't know, they moved it before I moved in there.

George Wisner: Okay.

Neil Vanderburg: I played in two old mill sites as a kid. 1 was in grammar school when I moved there and we used to go and play in the old mill sites. But that mill was there just before we moved there.

George Wisner: So the mill was there before you moved there. Was there one to move the tractor to, in otherwords the one you worked at?

Neil Vanderburg: The one they moved the tractor to was the last mill.

George Wisner: Okay. They used that steam tractor at the other mills as well?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Now you spoke of some concrete deal there.

George Wisner: There was a couple of arched fire boxes. There were two fire boxes in the mill and the old arch and brick and sitting on top of that sat the boiler.

Neil Vanderburg: Shortly after that mill was put up there, it burned down. And that was how Weinert got involved with it. It sounds to me like you had a different fire box then what the mill had before it burned down.

George Wisner: So this would have been a fire box that came later?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Because the old steam engine, I mean it was a boiler and so forth on four wheels. You just drove it up there and actually they used the steam engine with a great big pulley on it and that's what run the mill. I mean the whole thing was all that tractor. Line it up with the pulley and put blocks under the wheels and fire her up and Start pouring the steam to it. That's the way they ran the mill.

George Wisner: That ran what?

Neil Vanderburg: That ran the whole thing.

George Wisner: And what was the whole thing, you had the edger, the planer and...

Neil Vanderburg: What we call the head rig. I don't know how much you know about saw mills.

George Wisner: I know a little bit but not a whole lot.

Neil Vanderburg: After the edger was the trim saw. They cut the length on the trim saw. That was my dad's job. It sounds to me like they put in a different boiler after it burned.

George Wisner: That may well be it, when did it burn, do you remember?

Neil Vanderburg: I would guess about 1938. Bill hadn't got it.

George Wisner: It burned shortly after you started working for them?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: Do you remember anything about that fire?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I didn't know anything about it 'til the next morning.

George Wisner: What was there to burn?

Neil Vanderburg: The whole mill was on a wood frame.

George Wisner: Okay. What did the wood frame look like?

Neil Vanderburg: 6 x 6's, you could walk underneath it. The conveyor went underneath the whole unit, and after the sawdust burner and so forth, but I can't remember for sure. But I imagine down at the head rig, probably there was 10 foot of clearance up to the head rig, and the conveyor went uphill a little ways.

George Wisner: The platform, was it an enclosed platform or did it just have pole sides and a shingle roof or something?

Neil Vanderburg: No, it was enclosed the way I remember it.

George Wisner: Did it have a shingle roof?

Neil Vanderburg: I think it had a tin roof. I know that Bill Coote told me that if he would have had one more bucket of water he could have got the fire out.

George Wisner: Where did they get water from up in there?

Neil Vanderburg: You see they dammed that and made a mill pond and all the logs were dumped into the mill pond. Then they were floated over to the mill and pulled into the mill. So you had a mill pond, so even though the creek was pretty small, over a period of time.

George Wisner: You had plenty of water backed up there to use?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. But I don't think Bill Coote had a pump or anything for pumping water for a fire.

George Wisner: It was a bucket brigade?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, he was the only one there.

George Wisner: He was there when the fire started.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, he was doing some welding or something of that sort.

George Wisner: Was there anything in the papers at the time on the millfIre out there?

Neil Vanderburg: We couldn't afford papers in the Depression, we didn't know what a newspaper looked like hardly.

George Wisner: Oh, okay you don't [knowI of any newspapers at all? What was wages like out there for you guys?

Neil Vanderburg: I think probably around 35 cents.

George Wisner: An hour?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: Boy, Tom Stephenson gave me a figure of $2.50 a hour for his job. [That was actually his daily pay. J. W.J He said he was real well paid.

Neil Vanderburg: I'd say he was.

George Wisner: That was a lot of money for the Depression.

Neil Vanderburg: I think he ... well if he was there when Weinert was running it and maybe they got up that high. I don't remember him and he may have come quite a while after I did. In 1940 1 was working for a shingle mill and I was getting 97 cents an hour and that was big pay. So I would say that he was in there at the start of the war if he got those kind of wages because that was big wages.

George Wisner: That's a lot of money.

Neil Vanderburg: I didn't know anybody that made that much money at that time to be quite honest with you.

George Wisner: Anybody live out at that mill site?

Neil Vanderburg: No

George Wisner: Was there a building there? Stephenson said something about a caretaker's shack was there, and the caretaker lived there off and on.

Neil Vanderburg: There may have been after the fire.

George Wisner: Okay, but before the fire there wasn't?

Neil Vanderburg: No.

George Wisner: Do they know how the fire got started?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah I think that Bill Coote was pouring a bearing or something like that and a spark got in some sawdust.

George Wisner: You say pouring a bearing, what do you mean?

Neil Vanderburg: Well in those days we used babbit bearings. You took those hand molders, something of that sort, and you had your cast iron bearing then you poured the hot metal inside of it, you filed it down to fit the shaft and put the top on it. I never did pour a babbit bearing, I was a millwright all my life.

George Wisner: So basically it was a result of a fire?

Neil Vanderburg: That would be my guess, I don't think Bill ever did any welding. He did a lot of forge work.

George Wisner: Did you have a forge out there?

Neil Vanderburg: I am sure he did, but I can't remember where it was.

George Wisner: Okay, we found what I think is the top of the old forge, I think. You haven't been out to the site, have you?

Neil Vanderburg: We didn't find it. We were down the creek a little ways from it, probably 200 feet from it.

George Wisner: That's why I want to take you out and have you walk the ground.

Neil Vanderburg: That might bring some memories back.

George Wisner: Take me through a day out at that mill when you were out there. What time did you go to work and what did you do?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, the whistle blew at 8 o'clock in the morning. All the mills had steam, and we had steam whistles going all over that country. 8 o'clock in the morning, one would be a little ahead of the rest. In those days they had what we call the strattle bug that they moved your lumber with and you have probably seen them.

George Wisner: Big straddle carriers. Well, actually they were used for carrying amunitions in the war.

Neil Vanderburg: They were used before the war. What you had was a block about this long with some steps in it. You stacked your lumber on that and then you drove a scrattle bug. He [driverj had some levers up there that he swung an arm in underneath the loads to pick them [lumber] up. The later ones had the shoes on the side and they picked up the lumber.

George Wisner: Up from the side?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, but the original ones he also had, they stacked their ties and stuff. They came out with rollers on the flatbed trucks and they could back these flatbed trucks under the loads and not have to man handle them. There was no fork lifts or anything like that so they had to. The road came in underneath the loads. Then he just had a roller on the back of his truck, rolled the load onto his truck and bound it down.

George Wisner: What was the road like to get in there? Was it a dirt gravel roads, plank or what?

Neil Vanderburg: Of course when we first moved there we were on the Berry Creek side but the road didn't go through over to Tampico and

George Wisner: Where did the road go at that time?

Neil Vanderburg: The road came in from the Tampico side to the mill. That road when you are coming up the hill from the Tampico side. ..just before you got to the top, the road took off from the present road and went kind of west and stayed in the bottom of that draw. You can still see remains of that old road in there.

George Wisner: Was it a plank road?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: Okay, what did they use for planks?

Neil Vanderburg: 3 x 12's.

George Wisner: What kind of trucks came in to haul this stuff off?

Neil Vanderburg: They were all Chevrolets and Fords and of course in '37 the new one was a '37 and there was even Model A Fords came in there, 4 cylinder.

George Wisner: What kinds of a dam, can you tell me a little bit about the dam structure they had there, is it an earthen dam?

Neil Vanderburg: This was a lumber dam. It was built out of lumber and it did leak a little bit.

George Wisner: How do you build a lumber dam? Is that just kind like tongue and groove?

Neil Vanderburg: They just threw logs across the creek there and put boards vertical in it. When they swelled up, they were tight.

George Wisner: Okay, about how much water did that hold?

Neil Vanderburg: I haven't the vaguest idea. It seemed like a big mill pond to me but I doubt if it was any where near as big as I remember it.

George Wisner: You were around when the mill burned, in terms of being in the area that is?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: You went up there afterwards, what did you see?

Neil Vanderburg: I didn't go up there afterwards not until they were rebuilding it.

George Wisner: When they rebuilt it do you remember what they rebuilt up there?

Neil Vanderburg: Not at all. My dad worked up there after they rebuilt it, but I never went up there after it was rebuilt.

George Wisner: How did this thing come about with Weinert?

Neil Vanderburg: Okay, Weinert owned the Airlie store. Bill had just got his first mill going good and it burned. So Bill kept some of the crew on that was good help and built the new mill. He got credit from old John Weinert at the store to feed these people. So what it amounted to was it was loaned to the individual men, but Bill Coote signed the voucher. So that went on for about three days and old John Weinert came up and said this is my mill.

George Wisner: He just took it over for payment on the bill and that was it?

Neil Vanderburg: Well he had gone through legal channels and everything. What he did, he forced Bill Coote into bankruptcy, and then he was assigned, anyway, given the job to supposedly get Bill out of it. Where it ultimately ended up with was he said that Bill never paid, so Bill Coote was out.

George Wisner: Okay, what happened to Bill?

Neil Vanderburg: Well now Donald Dickey who was up there, did you see the book on Donald Dickey that Bob's [Zybach] got?

George Wisner: Yeah I've seen that one.

Neil Vanderburg: I've got a copy of that, my name is on that book also. But anyway we went and interviewed Donald Dickey and Donald Dickey stayed in touch with Bill Coote clear up until he died I guess. But to me he just disappeared. But he had a machine shop on the north side of Dallas and farm work and stuff you know, sharpening ground shears. He was good at it.

George Wisner: How long did Weinert operate the mill? Did he go into the logging business then?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh yes, his son is still a big logger over in the Eddyville country.

George Wisner: That is John Weinert. John Weinert took the mill over and was it John Jr. that worked there?

Neil Vanderburg: John Jr. now has a helicopter and logs with a helicopter over somewhere around Eddyville [Weinert was part owner of a mill that operated in Eddyville after \VW II known as the W.O.W.Weinert Oudekirk, and Weinertmill. It had ceased operations by the early 1970s].

George Wisner: The old man has retired.

Neil Vanderburg: The old man would be dead by now.

George Wisner: I know he is, but John Jr. is now retired.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah I suppose.

George Wisner: He is living over in Hawaii, I talked to him afew weeks ago, he says he can't remember anything about the mill.

Neil Vanderburg: Is that tight!

George Wisner: Either he is not talking or not remembering.

Neil Vanderburg: He was going to college during all that stuff.

George Wisner: Weinert was?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, John Jr.

George Wisner: Okay, so he came up and helped around the mill?

Neil Vanderburg: Junior, I never saw him around there.

George Wisner: So strictly John, Sr.

Neil Vanderburg: John Sr. ran the mill and of course John Sr. was still around the grocery store there at Airlie for a number of years, and the mill both.

George Wisner: Do you remember how long that mill continued to operate?

Neil Vanderburg: I can't tell you that, we left and moved over to LaComb in '42 and we actually left before the war took it over. There was some Sort of a deal. We had a loan with the Federal Land Bank and Federal Land Bank knew the government was taking over so they kicked us out before the government took it over so they could get the whole thing. Otherwise it would have had to divide what the government allowed for the farm. There were several of us in there put arrears on our payment and all. They just kicked us out so they got title.

George Wisner: Did you work with Weinert at all?

Neil Vanderburg: No, my dad did but I didn't.

George Wisner: Back to the mill site itself when you were working there can you describe for me how that edger worked and what kind of machinery you had there with that?

Neil Vanderburg: The edger was nothing but a machine about this wide with blowers in it.

George Wisner: That is about 2 1/2 feet wide.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. And these rolls feed the wood. Then there was, I would say, probably 6 saws in there.

George Wisner: So rolls feed the wood. You mean just flat rolls like regular rollers?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, then the edgerman just fed the wood into rolls and then it just took the wood through.

George Wisner: And the saws were they set up?

Neil Vanderburg: They were set up side by side. Then they would slide on the shaft. The edgerman had numbers on a plate in front of him. For what he wanted to saw he would just slide these saws back and forth for whatever he wanted, 2 x 4's, 2 x 6's, 2 x 8's, 2 x 10's.

George Wisner: Oh, okay.

Neil Vanderburg: Then if he wasn't using all the saws he could shove them clear over to the left. If he just wanted to make 2 x 12's, he just used two saws. But if he wanted to split, make a whole bunch, maybe he wants to make 3-2 x 4's, well he is using four saws.

George Wisner: Was this a brand name edger of any kind or just a home built kind of thing?

Neil Vanderburg: It was a brand name but I can't give you the name of it. My dad worked off-bearing the edger and trimming. So he worked with the edgerman quite a bit. If the edgerman had any problems, well my dad came around the edger and got these..

George Wisner: Do you remember any of the names of the fellows that worked there?

Neil Vanderburg: I can picture them, but I can't come up with

George Wisner: Take me for a walk through the other machinery then, describe that tractor for me, was it a John Deere tractor or what was it?

Neil Vanderburg: You never saw a steam tractor?

George Wisner: Yeah, I have seen them. But I can't remember what kinds they had or anything?

Neil Vanderburg: There is a whole bunch of them out there by Woodburn, you know. They were just the same as those were.

George Wisner: Did they have a name to them, regular name?

Neil Vanderburg: I am sure they did. There was a Waterloo or something like that.

George Wisner: They had large steel wheels on them?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. They were used, the old tractors. After the gasoline tractors came in and so forth, they were used in prune dryers and any place that you might want steam. This

Neil Vanderburg: was the situation. I worked in a shingle mill in the early 40's and we ran our shingle mill with an old steam tractor.

George Wisner: How did they get water into that steam tractor, did they put it in by hand or did they pipe it?

Neil Vanderburg: I worked with steam quite a bit myself in my millwright work. You have to have a pump to pump into a steam engine because you were putting water with virtually no pressure into a boiler with 120 pounds in it. So you have the steam pump. What it amounts to is a cylinder run by steam. It pushes a smaller cylinder, it pushes the water into the little series of valves so that it just goes one way.

George Wisner: And then the water was then piped to that steam engine and it came from the creek?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, gravity.

George Wisner: About the head rig, what did that consist of2

Neil Vanderburg: Well you had a saw on the top and a saw on the bottom that didn't quite match up.

George Wisner: Circular saws?

Neil Vanderburg: Circular saws, yeah. For the most part those logs there didn't ever reach the top saw because they weren't big enough, just on the butt. Where you did, you had a step in your lumber because the saws couldn't match up.

George Wisner: In other words, if a log was too big the top saw kicked in?

Neil Vanderburg: The top saw kicked in and cut it off, usually it was just on the butt, swell butts.

George Wisner: You had the planer, what did that consist of?

Neil Vanderburg: You know I don't know much about the planer even though I ran it. Of course, they had planer knives in them. Basically it was a deal where it was a bit like the old lawnmowers only the blades came around.

George Wisner: Can you describe one of those blades for me can you tell me a little bit about those?

Neil Vanderburg: I might be able to find you a planer blade.

George Wisner: Is it just a piece of steel that's cut blade shape, how long are they, about a foot and a half long?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, they were about 16 inches long something like that. They were considered real good metal for making butcher knives out of when they were wore out. Everybody wanted them for butcher knives.

George Wisner: Is there any other machinery on the site there?

Neil Vanderburg: Not that I can think of.

George Wisner: Anybody doing any drinking out on the site?

Neil Vanderburg: That part I wouldn't know. I was too young to drink at all.

George Wisner: I found some old Acme beer cans.

Neil Vanderburg: Well I have an idea there was some beer drank one thing or another. In fact I think I know one guy that probably threw those there.

George Wisner: Okay, what was his job out there?

Neil Vanderburg: I think he pulled the green chains.

George Wisner: That's sort of what Stephenson said too. [Laughter]

Neil Vanderburg: That whole mill had to be up in the air quite a ways. Like the guy that took lumber from my dad, he flipped the lumber down just a sliding deal onto the green chains, he had a 6 foot drop from where my dad was down to the green chains. They had to pull the green chains. They stacked that lumber so the truck could get underneath it. So you are getting up fairly high there.

George Wisner: Were there other men that weren't loggers and fallers that cut the timber up on the hill around there, hook it to your teams, drive one log at a time down put them in the ponds? Did you have a cable system or any series of dogs to bring the lumber up from the ponds?

Neil Vanderburg: It was a cable system that brought the logs in. They would roll the logs into the pond with a peavy because they couldn't get the horses too close to the edge of the pond in the first place and they couldn't take a chance on the log pulling the horses in.

George Wisner: Peavy, is that one with a hook?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. They would roll them into the pond and then the pond monkey would line them up with the head rig and he would probably have four or five of them lined up ahead all the

George Wisner: The sawyer? He operated the head rig entirely? Is that all he did?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, he was the brains of the outfit, more so than the other man.

George Wisner: The guys, did they have to maintain their own machinery? Did you have a millwright out there?

Neil Vanderburg: Bill Coote was the millwright pretty much when I was there, he did all the saw filing. See in those days you didn't have carbide tips so you filed the saws every two hours. What they did on the head rig, the teeth were removable. So at coffee break, we took a coffee break not because we needed the coffee but we needed the down time. They had a deal and they just roll these teeth out and roll new ones in and away we went again.

George Wisner: What did they do with the teeth, just leave them lay?

Neil Vanderburg: Resharpen them. He would sharpen them while the mill was running.

George Wisner: And you did that how many times a day?

Neil Vanderburg: Four times a day.

George Wisner: How did the men get to work in that Site? Did they come from long distances or did most of them live in the area?

Neil Vanderburg: They were all local farmers, most of them.

George Wisner: Stephenson said he lived in an old boarding house, there was a farm right down the road there a ways.

Neil Vanderburg: That would have been on the other side of the hill, that must have been on the Tampico side. My mother boarded two men for awhile but that was way before he was there.

George Wisner: I don't know if he's talking day or hour but he's saying hour, that just sounds like a lot of money to me for that period of time.

Neil Vanderburg: See, 15 cents an hour was pretty common. That is what farm hands got. Getting $2.00 a day for 10 hour day. Its clear out of line, I don't think that mill ran long enough for him to get that kind of money is what I am sayin'. I think Camp Adair took it over before he got anywhere near what he said.

George Wisner: I guess the government took it over not long after that and shut everything down.

Neil Vanderburg: It got Weinert started in the timber industry, the government paid him enough. Of course, the government may have let him run it for awhile because they needed lots of money to build Camp Adair so I don't know when they shut it down.

George Wisner: Where would that lumber go after you folks milled it?

Neil Vanderburg: I am trying to remember just what the deal was but I worked for, I think I did work for Weinert for a little while, and he hauled the lumber to Suver and had a planer at Suver. I think he planed it over at Suver.

George Wisner: Was there any kind of planer set down at Adair?

Neil Vanderburg: I never was in at Adair, you know.

George Wisner: Okay that is where it was at that time, so you are talking the same planer probably. Stephenson mentioned one at Adair.