M.. Cooper's Sawmill

Neil Vanderburg: And then right back in here where these oak trees are is where Forest Tandy lived. Those oak trees were there when he lived there.

Bob Zybach: That'd be about northeast about a mile? A half mile?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, three-quarters of a mile, something like that. By the way, the school teachers lived with Forest Tandy, because they had to, because he was chairman of the school board, and they had to walk through that mud to get to school every morning. But this is approximately the same place that the road was when I was here, only I remember it going more of a right angle than it's going here.

Neil Vanderburg: That's about it, that's about where a bridge would have been.

Bob Zybach: Okay, so the 150 going up, you think that might have gone up to where Hanish's old place was?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I'm saying that's the road 1 got the slab down from Bennett's mill.

Bob Zybach: So you think this road over here goes up to Bennett's Mill?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, that has the same contour. Maybe there's another one over here like that.

Bob Zybach: Okay, let's try the 190 first. But we're right at the corner of the 150 here.

Neil Vanderburg: I told you about that bridge there, you know, and I came down the hill and I hit that bridge, "YEEUMP" then I hit the dirt again. Now, I'm going this way.

Bob Zybach: Yeah, that's the 170 there.

M. Cooper's Sawmill

Bob Zybach: Okay, we're at the mill site on the 190 - 100 intersection shown by Rowley. And Neil and I are here next to a V that looks like a skid trail that's probably 8 or 9 feet high on the high bank and 3 to 5 feet on the kit bank, but we're not finding any evidence of a mill pond or anything.

Neil Vanderburg: One thing about this skid trail, it's a horse skid trail. A cat couldn't go down through there. So that's proof of logging back 50 years ago. I was up to Cooper's Mill one time, came in from Airlie, and this is about the proper location for Cooper's Mill as near as I can find. Donald Dickey said it was behind their house, and I know their whistle from our house was just about straight west, and this is not the Bennett Mill site i'm sure because the terrain is not right. So 1 would make a pretty educated guess that this is the old Cooper mill site. Like I say, it was a logging show. We haven't really located enough water to run a steam engine around here. And all of the mills except Bennett's mill were run with steam engines. And so that's the only thing that I'm not seeing that would make it the Cooper Mill site.

Bob Zybach: I think another thing is we're seeing a lot of skid trails and road systems coming off the series of small benches here, and in this skid trail we're seeing trees that we're both estimating to be about 40 or 50 years of age, up to 24 or so inches in diameter are the largest ones.

Neil Vanderburg: This skid trail looks like it's going right into a mill pond. I mean you see several skid trails coming into this skid trail, but this one here looks like it's dropping into a mill pond.

Bob Zybach: Can you think of anything else in this particular area here? We've got the road system going into Airlie, we've got the location by the whistle, and we've got Don Dickey's word. When did Coopers move out of this area?