4.. The Coote and Weinert Mill Site

Neil Vanderburg: Bill Coote just hauled his lumber out here, ran it through the planer and into the box cars and trains took it off wherever it was going, 2" dimensional lumber.

George Wisner: What about the railroad ties?

Neil Vanderburg: Well they went from here too from this siding.

George Wisner: When did you work here?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh probably '38 or '39 right in there. I just worked here a couple of days. They transported me over here from the mill. I knew about the siding because I came down here. They had church meetings and stuff like that.

George Wisner: What all was here at this particular siding, there was the planer mill and what was around it?

Neil Vanderburg: That was all that was here that I remember. There was a loading dock there and the planer. As far as the siding was concerned, they also shipped grain. Farmers used it. It was actually originally a farmers siding.

George Wisner: Okay we are now about a quarter of a mile north of the pre-existing road, the initial road into the Coote mill site. Neil, tell me about this road and what it was at one time?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, I am pretty sure that this was a gravel road going in here, I think there is actually about enough gravel in the soil that we just graded it and there was gravel they got to airight.

George Wisner: And this road was put in when roughly?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, let's see, we moved here in '35, I would say '31, 1938.

George Wisner: Okay, it was put in when, when the Berry Creek road was put in?

Neil Vanderburg: When the Berry Creek road was put here.

George Wisner: This leads directly to the mill site, right?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. I'm pretty sure it was not a tram road.

4. The Coote and Weinert Mill Site

George Wisner: We are now on the Coote Mill site and we are standing in front of a large cylindrical steel framed object. Neil, what is this as best as you can determine?

Neil Vanderburg: I would call it the shell around the boiler that had the fire in to heat the boiler.

George Wisner: This is not part of an old steam tractor then?

Neil Vanderburg: No.

George Wisner: Is it part of a steam donkey of some kind?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't know. It could be. But that is the fire box there.

George Wisner: This is the fire box.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Here's the door where you stoke the wood in.

George Wisner: Okay he's pointing at a square opening on the top side of this metal object. How would you describe the plate? is it boiler plate, steel or what is it?

Neil Vanderburg: No that's just a burner. It is about as thick as it ever was. I would say that this has rolled over. That door would have been on the side probably not on top. If you had a good hot fire in your boiler, you'd open that door. It would singe your eyebrows with it on top.

George Wisner: This goes back to a point then, like a wigwam burner?

Neil Vanderburg: No. It just collapsed, it would have been the same all the way back, a cylinder.

George Wisner: Describe for me this platform here again, what do you think it is?

Neil Vanderburg: Well I'm sure that's where the old steam engine sat. Whether it was the old steam

Neil Vanderburg: tractor or whether it was a steam engine. But those stakes is what they could run over to the mill with it.

George Wisner: Three pipes in the ground at the end.

Neil Vanderburg: Of course they are all kind of loose now. This is all decomposed in here, but certainly it was very possible if you pull one of those stakes up. It has rusted off down there.

George Wisner: Okay, you would believe a steam tractor engine was on top of there.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Originally Bill Coote ran this with a steam tractor. My dad worked here after the mill was rebuilt, but I didn't. It is possible that that steam tractor was ruined in the fire, or they still could have used it. But they do have a burner here for heat. It could be they ran some steam pipes in here to help the steam tractor along, I don't know. When I was here, the old steam tractor sat in here.

George Wisner: How large a platform would that have been?

Neil Vanderburg: The steam tractor would probably have been pointed to the south rather than what you are thinking of with the north. It would have been backed in here. Then those pipes would have been behind it. This would have been the platform where they fired the boiler. Then they would have had their wood stacked back in here.

George Wisner: Describe this babbitt bearing for me, would you? How it would have been used?

Neil Vanderburg: Well what they did, I never did pour a babbitt bearing. I worked around them quite a bit. But what they did, they had a ladle and they would put, well it was basically kind of a lead. They would put it in the forge and they would heat it until it was liquid. This thing here, they would put ends on it and put a shaft in it and then they would pour the babbitt around it. But they would put something on the shaft so it wouldn't stick to the shaft. Then when they got it poured then they pulled the shaft. They had a tool, I can't remember what it was called, but it was kind of round a little bit like a round wood chisel. It was sharp on the sides, and they would fit that with that tool. It was no small job to pour a bearing. I mean by the time you poured it and then you cooled it and then you ... it was not a small job.

George Wisner: This is kind of the mold for the babbitt bearing then, this is half of the mold?

Neil Vanderburg: No, because the babbitt stayed in that, you put that on the, you held the babbitt bearing with that.

George Wisner: Okay, how was this attached to the shaft?

Neil Vanderburg: There was a deal that fit over the top of it with four bolts. It came through it from the bottom and the half was pulled down.

George Wisner: You mean they were just bolted down with nuts?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, and long bolts. Probably the bolts went through the wood frame of the mill, those bolts were probably 10-15" long that held that bearing down and went through...The thing that they did, another thing they did when they poured these, they put shims in them, on the sides. When it started to wear, they could start taking these shims out and tighten it back up again. They could make that bearing run quite a little longer by taking shims out. Cars up until about 1930 had babbitt connecting rods, and they were poured the same way. Then they came with the inserts and they had babbitt on them, on the surface of them. Later, they came to the stainless bearings that we have today.

George Wisner: The babbitt was what kind of metal, just poured iron?

Neil Vanderburg: No it was lead, it was soft. That was the reason why they could work it. Also, if that bearing went out. Most of these shafts around these mills were at least 60' long. If

Neil Vanderburg: you had a steel bearing on there and that went. You would gaul [score] the heck out of that shaft. You would be replacing 60' shaft and taking all the bearings and everything off of it, and all the spools and everything. So they would rather have the babbitt go out than the shaft.

George Wisner: The babbitt bearing was then expendable?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: Compared to the shaft?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, by far.

George Wisner: Let's move over to some other pieces of equipment over here, we are moving to the east. We ran across a wood supported piece of tin in a semicircle, what would you describe this as?

Neil Vanderburg: My guess, it is purely a guess, but I've used them and that would be the mold for fitting new bricks in the boiler. Now the ones I have always used, you worked from the inside and you had a convex. But this looks like the angle of the boiler. You take and lay your brick mortar and lay your bricks in here as far as it goes then move it and glob it up and put in another batch of them until on both sides you get to the top and you put in the key brick or the key stone. That's my guess.

George Wisner: Now looking a conical topped metal piece to the north of the boiler, Neil how would you describe this, what's its purpose?

Neil Vanderburg: I would say it was a suction cone to pull the sawdust off the head rig. It is way out of place from where it belongs. It should be down there by the creek, because it should have been on the main mill. But the mill has been down for a long time and things have been moved around. I am sure that's what it is. I can show you a bunch of them in mills today almost identical to that.

George Wisner: Why do you describe it as that, you mentioned the dogs on the side?

Neil Vanderburg: Well those, actually there's some baling wire sticking out of this one and they hung that above the saw to, either the saw or the sander, or more likely probably the edger. You see that is just about as wide as that edger I explained to you. So I bet you that was the hood off the old edger.

George Wisner: And that would take and funnel the sawdust away and then fuel the burner?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: And the shafts adjacent to it? There is two shafts there about 4' long, one is about 4' long and the other is about 3' long.

Neil Vanderburg: This shaft here is driven by something that was pinned. So it would probably pull a pretty good load for its size. The shorter shaft is a bigger shaft, and I believe that that bigger shaft would fit that babbitt bearing that we found down below there if the babbitt bearing had the babbitt in it. If you had to turn it off, it had a belt going down in below the mill where the main drive shaft was. This belt had some slack in it, then there was an idler with a weight on it. It held that belt tight. So if you wanted to shut your machine off, you would grab that belt, pull the idler off the belt and then the thing goes to a stop and the rest of the mill would continue running.

George Wisner: What are you describing here, how does that fit into that picture?

Neil Vanderburg: I kind of think maybe that this might have been some part of that metal that the rope hooked on to to pull the idler up. But you see it was very important that you had all these machines driven by idlers because even pulling the idler they were slow to stop. If somebody got caught in a machine, it took a long time for the whole mill to just stop.

George Wisner: What you are describing then is a piece offlat iron with two pieces offiat iron welded in a

George Wisner: "V" shape at the end of it?

Neil Vanderburg: Let's use the word forge welded. That is a forge weld on there.

George Wisner: How can you tell that is a forge weld?

Neil Vanderburg: You don't see any bead on there and what they did they twisted this piece, then they heated the whole thing quite hot and hammered them together. That's what they call a forge weld.

George Wisner: The holes in both ends would have been for what?

Neil Vanderburg: Bolts. That is a forge weld and I haven't seen one of them in a long time. Probably the first one you ever saw.

George Wisner: Probably it is the first one I ever saw. We have moved over the east of the large boiler, we are now looking at one or two metal cylindrical objects, sort of wrapped in log cable with all kinds of metal pieces hanging off them, what do you think they might be?

Neil Vanderburg: I know what it is. It is a running board. It is an old truck body. These are the fenders.

George Wisner: Oh, what kind of truck?

Neil Vanderburg: I have no idea but that's the clutch pedal sticking up there.

George Wisner: What do you suppose that would have been used for? Why is there a piece of log chain wrapped around it?

Neil Vanderburg: Log cable. I don't know. But they did use old truck motors and stuff like that, leaving the clutches on them to pull logs out of the mill ponds. It may have been cut down. On the back end of the motor a pulley was put on it to run something like that, leaving the clutch in it. Didn't you recognize that?

George Wisner: fLaughterj

Neil Vanderburg: You were standing on the running board.

George Wisner: We have moved about another 20 yards to the east of the old truck body, we are finding a large brick double enclosure with trees growing out of it and trees falling over it. How would you describe this?

Neil Vanderburg: Well as I stood here and looked at it, there is another one beside it. I imagine after I left here and after Weinert took it over, that they put in a kiln drier and this is where they got the steam for their kiln drier, that would be my guess. That is not any part of any boiler that I ever saw.

George Wisner: How would those work? What would be the purpose of this stuff here?

Neil Vanderburg: They used steam and built a building. They run steam pipes back and forth in the building and bring the heat up to 150 or so degrees and then when the steam is reheated, it could have even been for hot water.

George Wisner: Would this be the firebox to something?

Neil Vanderburg: This would be a firebox here.

George Wisner: The fireboxes, what would have been on top of it or around it?

Neil Vanderburg: Well I don't imagine you'd want to stand on top of it, probably pretty hot.

George Wisner: There wouldn't have been anything on top of it then?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't think so.

George Wisner: This just would have been straight fire inside here?

Neil Vanderburg: Fire inside with some pipes in there to carry it.

George Wisner: Okay, you've got pipes coming out here on both sides.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, well I have an idea now. Back when I was a kid the old wood stoves had pipes coming out of the burner to heat the hot water tank and they were embedded in the bricks. The bricks get red hot and the pipes are embedded in the bricks to keep them

Neil Vanderburg: from burning up. I have an idea that is what they did here.

George Wisner: Where would those pipes have gone?

Neil Vanderburg: They would have gone to the dryer.

George Wisner: Where would the dryer have been possibly in relation to all this?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh any flat spot. But that is not a boiler per se.

George Wisner: Why would there have been log cables attached to this?

Neil Vanderburg: That held the cement together. That was like your building.

George Wisner: Why would there have been two fire boxes?

Neil Vanderburg: Well they probably built one, they didn't have enough heat, they got one to get bigger, so they put another one right beside it.

George Wisner: The pipes that you see in there would have been how the water was heated as it went through there?

Neil Vanderburg: I would think so. There was probably more pipes than you see, I think there was one up here.

George Wisner: And they would have gone to the dryer, what would they have done at the dryer?

Neil Vanderburg: Heated it. Now you would have seen something else that you don't see anymore and that is thermal circulation. Your hot water goes in the top as it cools it goes down and the hot water keeps pushing the cold water back. So that's where you get your circulation from.

George Wisner: So inside the dryer, what would the dryer have looked like?

Neil Vanderburg: Just a wide open building that you could stack lumber in.

George Wisner: It just would have been hotter than normal inside?

Neil Vanderburg: It would have been like maybe 150 degrees.

George Wisner: Because of the hot water flowing through the pipes?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. I am not absolutely positive but you asked me for a guess and I'd say that is a guess. But I think it is an educated guess, because I have been around lumber dryers and veneer dryers, I could show you a lumber dryer if you want.

George Wisner: Well tell me a little bit about this dam again, as you see it, it is diagonally across the creek and how would it have been built?

Neil Vanderburg: Well they put the boards sloping probably 30 degrees so that the pressure was pushing down on the bottom of the boards. I think they had cables across the back of it, strung across between some trees to hold it from going on down, and the boards were vertical. I believe they were 2 x 8's in a vertical position. Then they had the timber across the top they leaned against. I think most of them were nailed in but right down there at the creek there were some of them they could pull out so they could clean out the pond because the pond would get full.

George Wisner: Okay what we are looking at is a diagonal slice of bermed-type land running across the creek and sloping downhill, at the moment it is rounded and humped and covered with ferns. There is an anchor bolt about midway down the bank. Does that bring anything to mind as to what that might be for?

Neil Vanderburg: I would say that that anchor bolt was below water level. The water level would have been clear up to this bank up here. Another proof that this is a old mill pond you look at the height of the ground here and over there. I mean there is still a lot of bark and stuff in this thing. That was a problem with these old mill ponds especially in these small mills. Debris that would build up in the bottom as the logs would slide down the hill and stuff.

George Wisner: Where would he have brought the logs in from and how would he have gotten down to the

George Wisner: mill pond?

Neil Vanderburg: They came brought in by horses right over on that bank over there, rolled them into the pond, pulled them across the pond.

George Wisner: Looking at the bank on the south side, northeast of the creek, they would have been brought down by horses?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. They didn't have any tractors, they brought them down by horses.

George Wisner: They would have dumped them here and from here how would they have been moved up to the platforms?

Neil Vanderburg: They just had pike poles and pushed them across.

George Wisner: They pushed them across over to what over here, what have been on the south side?

Neil Vanderburg: There was a wood ramp right up here on the bank. They had a cable come down through it, and that's what I thought possibly the truck engine was hooked on to. If you look up there, probably that truck engine is right straight above us here and you see.

George Wisner: Before we go any farther, there is something else I want you to look at, just shortly a little ways away from here. Looking up stream from the dam about 25 yards we find an old barrel welded together with another barrel and two semi circular metal objects. Describe the metal barrel for me. What do you think that ought to be used for?

Neil Vanderburg: In my lifetime as a millwright we've done this to a lot of barrels. We even threw a 4 foot pieces of wood in them and keep warm. And we are not too far from the head rig here. You take the ramp that I was talking about that they pull the logs up is right here.

George Wisner: You are pointing directly to the east?

Neil Vanderburg: Well I would say we are pointing south.

George Wisner: You are pointing south that way directly to the south of the metal barrels, there would have been this ramp?

Neil Vanderburg: I have an idea, you take the sawyer, he didn't do any work basically except run the carriage through, but he did some paper work so in the winter time he probably needed some heat and these barrels were a heater.

George Wisner: It was just a barrel stove.

Neil Vanderburg: Just a barrel stove, yeah.

George Wisner: What about these two other pieces of metal right directly to

Neil Vanderburg: This is half the pulley that drove the head rig. The head rig ran with a 12" belt. This would have been the pulley that probably that ran the edger or cutoff saw or something like that.

George Wisner: There were two halves so they could be dismantled?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. You have a shaft that is 60' long. You had to take the pully apart to put them on. You had deals similar to that bearing that you saw that fit in here and rocked on the shaft.

George Wisner: They were belt driven?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

George Wisner: Large rubber belts or leather belts?

Neil Vanderburg: They were rubber belts. They weren't endless like they are now, we had to lace them.

George Wisner: Are these in approximately the position they would have been in had everything been here?

Neil Vanderburg: Well basically I am saying this heater would have come from the head rig and I think the whole works was brought down from up there about 35 feet.

George Wisner: That is about 35 feet to the

Neil Vanderburg: Where the head rig was.

George Wisner: to the northeast they would have been hauled.

Neil Vanderburg: You see we would have still been standing in the water in the pond right here. Somebody has moved these things, scavaging I think. What we should do is go over on the other side and find where they dumped the logs in then we could tell more how high the mill pond was. I think the mill pond would have been up about the height we are right here. They brought the logs in on the other side and I don't know how this creek runs but apparently it works its way that way so there was a lot of timber on that side of the creek.

George Wisner: We are standing by at this round, heavy metal cylinder back on the main mill complex. First Neil thought it might be a barrel arrangement of some kind. You have looked at it again and what do you think now?

Neil Vanderburg: I think this is a storage tank for these steam engines. They didn't recapture any steam, it all blew into the air. And they need lots of water for those things. I think this was a thousand gallon tank that was evidentally pulled out of the creek here to supply water to the steam engine. It is right close to the steam engine here.

George Wisner: Okay by right close you mean it is right close to that plalform that you think the steam engine could have been on?

Neil Vanderburg: Where the stakes were driven. We have made a trip around the pond. Definitely we found the dam site and so forth and come back up. Found where the head rig was and everything, so I am quite sure that the boiler was taken out of here and this was just an old tank of 1,000-1,500 gallons and they used a lot of steam in those days. They didn't even waste much water out of a boiler in town to blow the whistle as what they ran here just starting it up. I think it blew steam. You could see the mill for 1/2 mile away from the steam. And you would hear the 8:00 and the noon and the 1:00 and the 5:00 whistles clear down where I live from this mill which is probably a good 2 miles, maybe 3, you could hear them all over. We could hear 5 miles just from our house every noon and start up time and quitting time.

George Wisner: Some time it used to be around 1,000 gallon tank, right now its an old dead fall of windthrown dougflasJ-fir laying on top of it.

Neil Vanderburg: I didn't think about them having had storage for that boiler. If we would have followed that road straight in we would have come in just about right on this mill wouldn't we?

George Wisner: I would suspect so.

Neil Vanderburg: If we hadn't cut off and gone down the stream. The road came in just below the mill. I would say down here, maybe somewhere between 50-100 feet from where we are standing, is where the road came in. The lumber was taken Out of here.

George Wisner: They got it out by truck?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. A lot of it was rough lumber, most of the ties were rough.

George Wisner: From here it was taken down to Suver?

Neil Vanderburg: Yes.