N.. Bennett's Sawmill

Neil Vanderburg: About 1939.

Bob Zybach: Do you know when they moved in?

Neil Vanderburg: They were here when we came here in '35.

Bob Zybach: Okay. And do you know if they had more than one location up in here?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I didn't. I do know that Red Fir Lumber Co. in Independence is the old Cooper Mill if you. . . there might be a possibility of finding out something from their history. They may have some history on it.

Bob Zybach: You mean like legal description or something?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, something of that sort. Because it was the old Coopers Mill when it was here and they renamed it Red Fir Lumber Co. when they moved to Independence. And that mill is still operating and it's hard to say what they might have, but they might be able to help you.

Bob Zybach: Okay, and then Don Dickey said there was no mills here when they moved here in '29.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: And as far as the two of you could remember Coopers, Bennetts and the three Coote's mill sites were it for this drainage through here.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. And like I say, I came into Coopers Mill one time. And I never got down into the mill site, I was up by the maintenance department when it was on the upper side of the road. But that doesn't have much meaning because I .. . maintenance section was apparently back a ways from the mill. And I was in there on Sunday afternoon.

Bob Zybach: Well, if we're not at a mill site, we're definitely on a site where a lot of logging has taken place. There's a lot of logs come up this skid trail.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, also if you look up we got quite a bit of sky showing through here, which would indicate possibly a mill pond and room for a mill in here.

Bob Zybach: Or sawdust pile?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, that's a possibility.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Why don't. . if you want to head up towards the road there, I'll head down this way

Bob Zybach: and we'll see if we can find any more evidence here.

Neil Vanderburg: Okay.

N. Bennett's Sawmill

Bob Zybach: I just took some photographs here we come up maybe a quarter mile up the 150 spur, and I took a picture of you walking up the ridge here. You want to kind of describe the way you remember this as compared to the way that you remember the Bennett's Mill?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, as we came up that first road there off the main road, we had a real steep climb, then a level spot then another climb and then very shortly after we got up the second climb we, Bennett's Mill was on the right hand side, and this terrain is about what it was. They had their mill up above the road. They logged with a cat. They pulled in their logs with a cable and a drum into the mill. The mill sat above the area where I used to haul slabs out of, so that they had room for the sawdust and slabs without having to use a conveyor system or anything. And they only logged for a couple of years and I don't think that they ever got where the sawdust was too bad. If they did they'd taken their Allis Chalmers bulldozer and dozed it down. But it was my job to keep the slab wood away from the mill because it would build up much faster than the sawdust. And they didn't want the slab wood built up so they. . . I don't remember

Neil Vanderburg: whether they sold me that slab wood for 50 cents a cord or 75 cents, but I remember I sold it for $1.25. And I was able to buy a '33 Chevrolet truck that was my pride and joy when I was only 15 years old. My dad always had to drive it down the county road because I wasn't licensed to drive it down the county road, or else he had to come with me. I had a learner's permit so I could drive on my learner's permit if he was with me. Some of the time we didn't even have the truck licensed, so

Bob Zybach: Okay, we're at what Neil thinks is probably the Bennett site. I was told to look for a road to the right. We're standing on a rOad to the right, we don't know how old it is, it could go back to the Columbus day storm, but a little bit lower down the hill, in similar terrain, there's evidence of another road to the right. So, would you think on this 150 spur somewhere between that first road to the right and this road to the right would be the mill site?

Neil Vanderburg: I would prefer to think that it was the other road to the right that we saw, because the way I remember it when I got to the top of the hill it was almost immediate that I made a righthand turn and went up the road up towards the mill and then back in below the mill to pick up the slab.

Bob Zybach: Now, you mentioned that they used an Allis Chalmers cat, one of the first ones that you'd ever seen

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah

Bob Zybach: And, can you tell me the problem they were having with that?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, the Allis Chalmers cat they put a spring crossways across underneath the front of the frame to make it easier riding, but I think, I can't remember Bennett's name, but he seemed to think it was about like a slingshot sitting on the back of that seat with that spring, and they were constantly breaking that front spring, and when they'd break the front spring then they'd have to shut down the whole mill, because it was quite a chore to put that spring in because it was down in there between the tracks.

Bob Zybach: Oh, where would the sawdust pile have been from here? Just to get oriented.

Neil Vanderburg: It would have been right under the brink of the hill, like right here.

Bob Zybach: So, it would have been along this road here but to the right?

Neil Vanderburg: To the right, yeah.

Bob Zybach: So it would be on the east side of the spur road to the mill and it would have been visible from the main road, right along the edge of the slabs.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Okay, I don't think we got it on the tape, hut you said they put out about 4 cords of slabs a day?

Neil Vanderburg: A day, yeah.

Bob Zybach: And then you had over 100.

Neil Vanderburg: I had over 100 cords of slabs there by the time school started in the fall. I think I had 125 cords out.

Bob Zybach: Right there at the intersection of the 100 road and Tampico Road?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Can you think of anything else in this area? Any hunting or any animals you saw up in here? Or any . . how about these madrone? Were the madrone a common tree?

Neil Vanderburg: Then, not real common, I always, for some reason I always thought a madrone was pretty. And whenever I saw a madrone I looked for it, and we had one on our farm, and I always enjoyed that machone. And we had a small one on our farm and

Neil Vanderburg: somebody stole it, they dug it up and took it home. They thought it looked better on their place than ours!

Bob Zybach: Did you call it anything other than madrone?

Neil Vanderburg: I didn't know what to call them. I thought that it was a possibility that it was myrtle wood. That was my guess on it.

Bob Zybach: Did you ever hear them called laurel?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. But there. wasn't that many of them around. The only one I knew was there on our farm. And I've seen quite a few of them on this trip.

Bob Zybach: Okay. So you think there might be more of them now, or you think we're just going to places that

Neil Vanderburg: I think there's more of them. I mean, after all, I went up and down this road three times, or six times a day all summer long that one year, and maybe my memory isn't as good as it oughta be because I was more anxious to get up there and get loaded and get back down again than I was about the scenery, but I'm sure that's the road I came up to Bennett's Mill, I'm absolutely positive of that.

Bob Zybach: How about oak? Do you remember more oak in the area?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't remember any oak up in here.

Bob Zybach: So, it looks pretty much the same then?

Neil Vanderburg: Pretty much the same. Of course, these trees were a little smaller. And we found quite a number of rotted off stumps that were in the 20" range, and that was . . . I told you before, I don't know if I told you on the tape or not, but most of these little mills were cutting for railroad ties. The railroad during the Depression had enough money to buy ties, and ties had to have the heart in it and you got more money if you could put the heart in the center of the tie. So these little trees 20" in diameter or so they could peel off some 2 x 4's and one-inch stuff. In those days there was a lot of barns built with I x 12's in a vertical position. There was a pretty good demand for I x 12's and 1 x 6's. We built -- our fence on the farm was all built out of oak posts that we cut ourselves and I x 6 boards going lengthways with it, rather than wire fences. One of the reasons for that was that Bill Coote lived right across the road from us and my dad had 2 24-inch pipe wrenches. Bill Coote wanted them and he said "I'll give you 2,000 board feet of 1 x 6's for fencing material for those two pipe wrenches." So my dad says, "Okay, if you'll let me borrow them if I need them," and Bill Coote says "That's a deal!" And so the next day a truck came and dumped 2,000 board feet of 1 x 6's and that's what we built fences out of.

Bob Zybach: Now we're looking at an old stump over there that's 35 or 40 inches, and we've seen afew of those scattered around. Would they have logged those for fuel for the boilers, maybe?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh, they didn't use a boiler on this site. They used Allis Chalmers diesel motors to run this mill. My guess would be that they probably cut those off short as a tie, with a little bit of trim, and were able to log them in that short of a log. But they defmitely didn't have the power to pull a long, big tree. But you'll find that most of these trees are in the 16-22 inch bracket that I'm talking about, and that's what Bennett and Bill Coote were both looking for when they were logging, was anything they could be sure to get a tie out of. You could almost get a tie out of that 10" tree there.

Bob Zybach: Would the larger trees, were those the ones that were left pretty much as seed trees then?.