2.. Bennett's, Cooper's, and Ford's Sawmills

Neil Vanderburg: That would have been at Suver.

George Wisner: Suver was Adair?

Neil Vanderburg: Suver was part of Camp Adair. Suver was a railroad siding for years and years and years. There was the church there. There was the Town Hall there, and they held dances in the top.

George Wisner: That was a pretty big town then?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh yeah. They had a grocery store and they also had a couple service stations there but not where the ones are there now. Al Flickinger had one on the southwest corner of that intersection and he became the big gas dealer in this area and then Camp Adair made him move kittycorner across the street.

George Wisner: Okay. Do you recall how much wood a day they were planing there?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't have the vaguest idea.

George Wisner: Five days a week?

Neil Vanderburg: Whenever Bill Coote had orders and whenever the mill wasn't broke down.

George Wisner: Did you have any particular problems in the years, time you worked at that mill?

Neil Vanderburg: in that mill also we were also shut down for dry weather because it was up in the timbers.

George Wisner: Okay, now lets go to the other side of the hill over on the Savage Creek side over there. Bob fZybachJ and I went back in that mill yesterday, we found what appears to be part of the old platform and there is a whole lot of timbers and stuff over there. Did that mill have a plaorm?

Neil Vanderburg: Well it was up above the ground like the other one for sawdust removal. All that stuff and was probably 2 planking that the men worked on.

George Wisner: So it was a similar type of set up?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. You had the catwalk, or the walk where the guy worked from the head rig over to the edger, and then out past the edger and rolls out to the end. So you would probably have a 60' catwalk there of varying widths.

George Wisner: Did you have substantially the same equipment down there as up on the hill?

Neil Vanderburg: All the equipment that was there was up on the hill when I moved there. That was just a place for us kids to play when I moved there.

George Wisner: It still pulled all the timber would have been pulled from right there in that immediate area?

Neil Vanderburg: No. That's why they moved the mills. You see in those days you built a mill and sawed the timber out around it that you would pull in with horses, and then you moved the mill.

George Wisner: And that is substantially what they did on all those mill sites?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

2. Bennett's, Cooper's, and Ford's Sawmills

George Wisner: Did you work at any other mills out there?

Neil Vanderburg: Bennett's mill. When I was fourteen, my dad had an old farm truck and I took a contract from them since I wasn't old enough to work. He sold me the slab wood for 50 cents a cord and I loaded it at their mill, brought it down to the county road and stacked it, and Jack Green paid me a $1.25 a cord for it down at the county road. So I made 75 cents a cord. You were asking how much lumber Weinert put out. They put out 4 cord a day at Bennett's mill in slab wood.

George Wisner: Oh wow. Was Bennett's mill primarily a slab wood mill or what did it..?

Neil Vanderburg: It was a tie mill.

George Wisner: Do you remember how many railroad ties either Coote or the Bennett's cut?

Neil Vanderburg: I haven't the vaguest idea.

George Wisner: How much dimensional lumber did they put out?

Neil Vanderburg: Well actually they put out more dimensional 2" lumber.

George Wisner: Did you know where those ties were going?

Neil Vanderburg: Just the railroad.

George Wisner: And they took them wherever they took them?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. But they called it a tie mill

George Wisner: I've got that one [Zybach's earlier interviews with Vanderburg] and I am going to incorporate some of that plus some of what we are talking about here. Because I think I am getting into a little more detail on the mills then he did. When we go over the actual site and look at the mills, look at the site out there, I am probably going to go into a lot more detail with you and see the whole picture.

Neil Vanderburg: Will you have a key available to get in with a vehicle?

George Wisner: Yeah. I'll have a key to get in to two mill sites down on Savage Creek, I can get into there.

Neil Vanderburg: Of course you can walk in there.

George Wisner: Yeah, once you get down there and then you can walk into the other one. The other one is not far off the road.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah I know but Bennett's is a couple of miles from there.

George Wisner: Yeah that's a ways in.

Neil Vanderburg: And Cooper's mill is quite close to Bennett's mill.

George Wisner: Okay we went up to those, I was up to those this week.

Neil Vanderburg: Oh were you, Bob take you up?

George Wisner: Yeah. There isn't a whole lot there. That upper mill at Coote has a lot of stuff, and I'd really like you to see that one.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah I want to see that. I am sorry I didn't keep walking. But we came to that flat spot, the ground there, and it was just about where I figured it was. We stopped and I shouldn't have. I told Bob right at the start, we were coming up from the Tampico side, and I told Bob that road took off to Coote's mill right at the top of the hill and went back. We went in the old road, the old slab road, tram road, and I found that spot. It had some characteristics of where the old mill was. So we looked around there and we found a little bit of evidence but not much. Then we came out. When we came out, we were still south of the top of that hill, where we came out so I was scratching my head. But we seemed to be coming out an old road there, but we didn't come out where I thought we should have.

George Wisner: Did you work at any other mills up there on the OSU Research Forests?

Neil Vanderburg: No.

George Wisner: Those were the two you worked at?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: And the only thing you did for Bennett was haul the slab wood?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: What years did you do that?

Neil Vanderburg: Gosh I don't know, I don't think that Bennett Mill was in there more than about six months. But that would have been close to '40 because they were logging with an Allis Chalmers cat and they didn't have a mill pond. They were pulling three logs at

Neil Vanderburg: a time with the cat and then they were pushing them up pretty close to the head rig and then pulling them in with a cable, they weren't floating them.

George Wisner: How many people worked up at the Bennett Mill?

Neil Vanderburg: Three brothers.

George Wisner: Three Bennett brothers. Do you remember their names?

Neil Vanderburg: No I don't.

George Wisner: Did they own that land there or were they just millwrights?

Neil Vanderburg: No I think they just bought the timber. I think they probably went broke, I don't know because they didn't stay long.

George Wisner: It was a pretty risky business in those days.

Neil Vanderburg: Oh yeah.

George Wisner: Why was that? Just because of the Depression?

Neil Vanderburg: Well yeah. How would you like to sell lumber for $10.00 a thousand. That's what it sold for then $10.00 a thousand for 1 x 6's for $10.00 a thousand.

George Wisner: Couldn't make a whole lot of money that way.

Neil Vanderburg: No, even though you weren't paying much for help, that's another reason why I don't see any possible way that they could have paid that.

George Wisner: It seems way out of line to me but I wanted to come and check.

Neil Vanderburg: I would guess it was more like 35 cents an hour. After we moved from there and went up, my dad worked for Ford's mill which is the Ford in Roseburg now. He started up at LaComb. And he was just as poor as old Bill Coote was. He had Ford logging trucks because Ford gave him credit for them. But anyway, my dad got 35 cents an hour when he was working at the Ford mill in 1942. That was pretty darn good pay by 1942, the war was already going by then.

George Wisner: Then they were paying a little better?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: Because they had them? Do you remember any more about that Coote mill?

Neil Vanderburg: .they put that..one thing that might be of interest, there was two reasons why they put the road through from Berry Creek over to Tampico. One of them was we moved in there and we had two high school kids all the time. The bus had to come around by Suver and come through Polk county and back into Benton county because we just barely lived in Benton county. So it was making a lot of extra busing to pick up my two sisters to take them to high school. By the time I went to high school they had that new road through. That and Bill Coote's mill were the two things that made the county put that road on through there.

George Wisner: How far away is Suver, about five miles?

Neil Vanderburg: Six miles.

George Wisner: That pretty much ought to do it for this.

Neil Vanderburg: I can't find the little piece of that first Coote mill but they had a, they logged their logs down a ridge and then they ran them down a shoot with water in it and that shoot was real steep and I did quite a bit of calling on this deal I did for Bob. I got ahold of one of the Cornutt boys and I asked him I says I heard that somebody got killed trying to ride a log down that shoot one time. He says, "yeah" he says that was. Mr. Gardner's brother.

George Wisner: Okay, I think I remember that in his report. in Bob's story, / think I remember you talking about that.

Neil Vanderburg: But I have not found the hill steep enough. I climbed that log shoot when I was in