S.. The Coote—Cornutt Sawmill #2

Bob Zybach: Yeah, four inches thick, and twelve inches wide, and just the width of the tires.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, you had 24 inches altogether. You had two side by side.

Bob Zybach: Oh, I see. For each tire.

Neil Vanderburg: For each tire. So you had 24 inches. Might have been 20 inches; might have been ten-inch planks.

Bob Zybach: And you called that a tram road?

Neil Vanderburg: We called that a tram road, yeah. And then, when you went around the curves, then they would put the lumber crossways of the road because your front wheels and your back wheels wouldn't all track together, so whenever you went around a curve then you would have a section there that was the boards were going crossways, solid.

Bob Zybach: What would you call a corduroy road?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, all the corduroy roads I knew were gravel roads that had gotten the bumps in them from use and hadn't been graded. I never heard of a corduroy road in the plank roads.

Bob Zybach: Did you ever hear of anybody making a corduroy road on purpose? To get up and over a hill, say, or something like that?

Neil Vanderburg: No.

Bob Zybach: Okay. So that was just something that got into a road by wear.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Actually you start bumps and pretty soon the bumps get longer and deeper. See this is right up on top of that ridge. I told you right where it was. But this other road, 1 think probably when we came into that other road, probably is a different road where those feathers were. [At the starting point of this stop we had discovered a recent site with a large number of wild bird feathers and empty beer cans.] I think it went on down further before it came into this road. it's possible, where those feathers were is where the slab wood was stacked, though.

Bob Zybach: And then all this across the road on the east side there, that was all field?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Neil Vanderburg: With some oak trees, scattered oak trees. Actually, it was sheep pasture.

Bob Zybach: Who pastured up over there?

Neil Vanderburg: I have no idea. The Gardner place came up almost this far. I understand you found evidence of a house up in there, and Donald [Dickey] remembered some woman living up there, but he didn't know who she was. And there was nobody living there when I lived here. And I don't know how she got up there, whether she came up through Sheppard's, or whether she came up the hill. But it would have had to have been a buggy road, it couldn't have been a car road. Of course, Donald thought they improved this road a long time before they actually did.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember a pond over there at all?

Neil Vanderburg: No.

S. The Coote—Cornutt Sawmill #2

Bob Zybach: We're just coming down the hill, 300 or 400 feet to the west of Tampico Road, and we're sitting at the site of the second Coote's mill here.

Neil Vanderburg: You could not quite see Bill Coote's mill from the county road over there, so probably back of us a little bit, but his housing for his mill crew was over here on Savage

Neil Vanderburg: Creek. And there wasn't all these trees in here then. And the reason why he put the mill shacks on Savage Creek was so he didn't have to dig a hole for their outhouses. They just did it into the creek.

Bob Zybach: Would they have platforms built up over the creek, or have to go out in the weather?

Neil Vanderburg: They had outhouses, sitting over the creek, but they just had some legs down to the creek and washed on down the creek, and no problem at all.

Bob Zybach: Did any of the neighbors mind?

Neil Vanderburg: No. I remember one time we went looking for Mayflowers for Mayflower baskets when I was going to grade school here, and Leslie Gardner took a drink out of the creek, and she says, 'Dh, it's all right, as long as water has flowed over 300 feet of gravel it's all purified." And we were standing there looking right at the outhouses over the creek.

Bob Zybach: So there wasn't near the concern in that day?

Neil Vanderburg: No, but of course at that time there was quite a number of mill shacks in here. Some of them were back on the side of the hill here, and actually. . . I mentioned Harvey Tandy. He lived over back next to the hill here. And there was, well, there was still probably four or five families lived right here in this mill shack area here. But the sawmill was, like I say, probably back another 100, 150 feet.

Bob Zybach: Okay, now where. . . on this road that we're on, was this road here at that time?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, the road came across the county road, just probably 400 or 500 feet before the road started the steep incline there. And came up at an angle.

Bob Zybach: About where it does now, pretty much?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, I'm not seeing any road over.

Bob Zybach: Okay, about where those cows are is where the road cuts in.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, right in there, and it came on up here, and it went on past the old mill and then went on past the first mill that Coote and Cornutt had, and ultimately ended up at the Chaffin house.

Bob Zybach: So this road we came in on, is this the old road?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: So if. .where this road used to go, not where it goes now, but where it used to go, up to

Bob Zybach: the Chaffin place, where we're now sitting.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. See they. . . it wasn't a year round road, it was. . . Chaffins used horse and buggies to go up there, and they could get the horse and buggies up it.

Bob Zybach: Okay. But that was this road?

Neil Vanderburg: That was this road.

Bob Zybach: I understand from talking with you and Jim Hanish earlier that the other road went up Savage Creek there and crossed over and went into Chaffins .

Neil Vanderburg: From the other side.

Bob Zybach: From the other side. So this is a big circular road system here then?

Neil Vanderburg: Basically, yeah. But at the time I lived here, until I herded sheep with old McKibbon, Gerald McKibbon, I didn't know that that road went through over to where the Hanish place was. I always thought that the road pretty much ended right there at Chaffin place. And then when I was herding sheep up there, well we pastured sheep over there on the other side of the mountain there, and then we'd bring them around to Chaffins, count them, and pen them up for the night. So that was the first time I knew that it went on around. But this was the road that Chaffins came in on.

Bob Zybach: The one to the mill here?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Oh, okay. Now this mill here had the same steam tractor as the...

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: And how about the first mill, did it have the same steam tractor?

Neil Vanderburg: As far as I know.

Bob Zybach: Did this mill site here have a pond to it?

Neil Vanderburg: No.

Bob Zybach: So this mill here, they yarded trees downhill by horse to this mill site?

Neil Vanderburg: As far as I know. This mill was closed probably six months before we moved here. When I went to school, of course the school [Berry Creeki was right over there by that wagon. And when I went to school, well Clifford [Cornutt] and I used to come up here and play in the old mill site, and all the timbers and the floors and the roof and everything was still on it. And we'd play hide and seek and climb in the rafters and all things that 16 year old kids do. And this was a good place to play. And of course, I told you about the old big barn that sat right down there. That was all put together with wooden pegs.

Bob Zybach: Okay now, where was that barn located from where we're sitting?

Neil Vanderburg: Just about right straight ahead of us.

Bob Zybach: Where that hay is?

Neil Vanderburg: No, quite a bit further. These trees weren't all in here. You could see the barn from the mill site. And it was on down, oh probably 500 feet and back a little closer to the creek than what you can see here.

Bob Zybach: Now that barn fell over during that snow?

Neil Vanderburg: No, it withstood the snow and then I think we had a windstorm or something a couple of years later and it went down.

Bob Zybach: So the windstorm would have been '39 or '40?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: And that barn was built out of old wooden pegs?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, there were no nails in it whatsoever.

Bob Zybach: Did the people that lived in these mill shacks continue living here when they continued working at the Coote and Weinert mill site?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember an old cabin or anything right around where we're sitting here?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. There was several of them.

Bob Zybach: 1 don't mean mill cabins, I mean like a log cabin or an old homestead?

Neil Vanderburg: No, there were just mill shacks up here. And this. . . when you look down there where that old barn is that's still standing that old Mr. White built.

Bob Zybach: Now that's the barn that's still standing, next to Berry Creek there?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. White was the last person on this road till you got clear up to Gardners. Except for these mill shacks. And the rest of them were all clustered around Berry Creek there.

Bob Zybach: Were these mill shacks. . . did you get the idea they were built here at the same time as the mill?

Neil Vanderburg: Urn hmm.

Bob Zybach: And they were just built out of mill lumber?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Rough lumber.

Bob Zybach: About how many families lived in this area here?

Neil Vanderburg: I would guess maybe six.

Bob Zybach: Did people look at these people that lived here any different than those of you that lived on the farms there?

Neil Vanderburg: Not really. Parkers were looked at a little bit. They were wood cutters. And wood cutters were looked down on, but loggers and mill workers were not looked down on. In fact, if anybody had a job working for a sawmill, had what was considered a good job. The best job you could have during the Depression was in the paper mill, and the next was in the sawmill.

Bob Zybach: So even the little sawmills like this were. . you were a mill worker whether you worked in a little sawmill or a big sawmill in the city?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, if you worked for a farmer you got 15 cents an hour, and if you went to work in a sawmill you got 35. So that was quite a step up.

Bob Zybach: Were some of the older families that had been here for a while, say like the Mulkeys and that, did they see a lot of you moving in during the Depression, working in the mills on the farms, as

Neil Vanderburg: Actually, we lived here before the Mulkeys did.

Bob Zybach: Oh, I see. So this part of the Mulkey family moved in later.

Neil Vanderburg: The Ennis's lived on the Mulkey place when we first came here. And the old man Ennis, he got ulcers and died of a bleeding ulcer.

Bob Zybach: So really the only old time family around here may have been the Smiths? Everybody else kind of moved in in the '20s and '30s.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. The Smiths and then the Dickeys.

Bob Zybach: Well the Dickeys didn't move in until '27.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, but they were old timers when we moved here. And the Hanishes were not very far ahead of us.

Bob Zybach: Early '30s.

Neil Vanderburg: And the Tandys, he moved in probably early '30s or late '20s.

Bob Zybach: So these mill workers would have been pretty much like the localfarmers. You all moved in here in the late '20s, early '30s, first part of the Depression pretty much.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. I don't think that this ground was farmed all that much. As a big farm. More pasture type farm. This soil down here on the creek, that's Chehalis, and that is very good soil, but very hard to work with a team of horses. I mean it just really makes hard clods that you just can't hardly break down. And the hill ground was also covered with fern and Canadian thistle that. . . it wasn't a real good place to farm. I really believe that a guy could make money nowadays with the herbicides and the big tractors and stuff, I think I mentioned that before in our conversation. But this ground right straight ahead of us, I saw that farmed one year while I was here. Otherwise it was pastured by sheep. And this was all pastured by sheep on this side.

Bob Zybach: Were these Folk's sheep through here? Or Smiths'?

Neil Vanderburg: I think they were Smith's. I never knew that Folk had any sheep. I thought he was more of a cattle farmer than a sheep farmer.

Bob Zybach: So people were living here in mill shacks, and there was an old tumble down mill and an old barn here and sheep wandering around through the area too.

Neil Vanderburg: Basically that's about the size of it. However, I didn't see that many sheep on this side of the road. At that time they were pasturing on the other side of the road.

Bob Zybach: Was this pretty pleasant in here? Playing with the kids through these houses through here?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. It was nice in here.

Bob Zybach: People keep lawns or grow flowers?

Neil Vanderburg: No, no. No they were poor people.

Bob Zybach: Did most of them have cars?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Old cars.

Bob Zybach: Model T's, that type of thing?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, really Model T's weren't that. . there was Model A's, and there was old Nashes and Studebakers, and Chevrolets, and there was quite a few Chevrolets went back to 1923. The Model T's went out in '28 and we're looking at a Model T at that time was almost 8 years old, you see, when I moved in here. And they were a cheap car to buy and all that, but they weren't all that popular.

Bob Zybach: Would they kind of look like a Yugo or something like that now?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, one thing, they didn't have a transmission in them, as such. They had what you call a planetary transmission, is what hydromatic is now. Only the hydromatic shift, with those you had three pedals under your feet with a Model T Ford, and one of them was the brake and the other two were gear shifts. And you just pressed on them, and you pressed the middle one and partway down it went into low, and then if you pushed harder on it you engaged another band and that put you in reverse. And the one on the right was considered a clutch but it didn't completely release. And the Model T's had magnetos on them for ignition and they had to be turned, the motor had to be turned over probably 30 or 40 revolutions per minute before those mags would put out enough spark for it to run. So you had to really wind its tail to get it started, unless you had a battery stuck on there on the side to get it started with. A few of the later ones had starters on them, but they

Bob Zybach: Did they have a hand crank?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Most of the Model T's were hand cranked to start them?

Neil Vanderburg: They all had a crank hanging on the front of them all the time. You didn't take the crank out, you just, when it started you just let it hang and it swung in the breeze while you went down the road. And so it. . . they were popular early on, but Ford was slow to change.

Bob Zybach: It just seemed old fashioned or something?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, there was other cars that were much better. They started putting in gearshifts in them. You take the Model T going up this hill here, if you didn't have a full tank of gas you had to back up it because the gas tank sat right up here in front of the windshield and if you didn't have enough gravity for it to flow into the carburetor well you had to back up the hill so you had gravity to put gas in the carburetor.

Bob Zybach: Was it uncommon to see Model T's backing up hills?

Neil Vanderburg: Not at all! Not at all!

Bob Zybach: Sounds like a pretty common way to get up the hill.

Neil Vanderburg: If you were low on gas you backed up the hill. You had to know before you started up the hill whether you had enough gas to get up the hill or not. And also the bands on a planetary transmission. . . I don't know if you know what a planetary transmission is or not, but.

Bob Zybach: No, Tm just learning about it right now.

Neil Vanderburg: But anyway, you have a drum and you have a bunch of little gears that run a gear underneath. And as long as there is no pressure applied to that drum the power goes right straight through on it. But if you want a reduction gear on it, you got a band on

Neil Vanderburg: the outside of it and you tighten that band and that makes those gears turn inside and then you get a lower gear. And you picked up the reverse the same way. Well, you start up a hill and it wasn't too uncommon at all that if your bands weren't tight enough, the bands would start slipping and they'd burn out and you didn't get up the hill and then it was a case of turning around and backing up -- use your reverse bands to get up. But Ford was very slow to . . . they wouldn't pay any patents. You see, Chrysler came out with hydraulic brakes in 1927. Ford waited until 1940 before they put hydraulic brakes on.

Bob Zybach: Just to keep from paying the patent on it?

Neil Vanderburg: And there was a lot of people killed because Ford was not willing to spend the patent money to put good brakes on.

Bob Zybach: Was that any kind of national news at that time, that people were getting killed because of that?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, people knew it, but they didn't have lawsuits like they do now, you know. But the thing is, clear up until 1937, when the Fords put brakes on all four wheels, you had brake rods going to each wheel. They were 3/8 steel rods, and if you made a real hard stop those rods would stretch, and they all stretched different, so the next time you stopped you didn't know which wheel was going to take hold and which one wasn't. So you had to have a pretty good hold on the steering wheel to keep yourself on the road until you adjusted the brakes again, and many people weren't mechanically minded enough to ever adjust the brakes. So they virtually drove without brakes. By the time they got up to '36 and had the V-8's, well those V-8's would go 85 miles an hour and you couldn't stop them! Till the next county!

Bob Zybach: The same old kind of braking system with the steel rods and stuff?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. And in '38 Ford came out with what they call a steel-draulic brake, which was cable brakes, with a self-energizing brake. Now a self-energizing brake is a brake that when the shoe comes out against the drum, the arms that the shoe is hooked to are made so that they feed into the drum at an angle, so when the shoe comes into the drum then these rods come out and give you much more braking power. And that's what Ford called their steel-draulic brake. And they ran that until '40 when the patents ran out on the hydraulics, and then they went to hydraulics.

Bob Zybach: Oh, I see. They didn't change their policy, they just waited until the patent ran out.

Neil Vanderburg: They waited until the patent ran out and then they put on hydraulic brakes. So that was one of the things against Ford. So you didn't see that many Model T's in the . Model A's weren't too bad, Model A had a top speed of about 55 and generally stopped all right. But, boy when they got into those V-8's, they were dangerous. They were light and they were dangerous.

Bob Zybach: The Model A's were?

Neil Vanderburg: No, the V-8's. Before they put the hydraulic brakes in. In the '40s and '41s Ford really made a complete change, streamlined them and all that stuff. And then he sold a lot of them.

Bob Zybach: Got the American public's confidence.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: But this area here then, we could guess that most of these guys might be driving older Chevrolets, and. .

Neil Vanderburg: An old Nash, or a Star, or that type of thing.

Bob Zybach: But probably wouldn't be seeing Model T's.

Neil Vanderburg: Not too many.

Bob Zybach: Did any of the farmers use Model T's in their field or anything out here?

Neil Vanderburg: Most of them used Dodges.

Bob Zybach: Dodges?

Neil Vanderburg: Dodges had a real slow speed motor with a big piston. They had a lot of power at low speeds and there was a lot of those that they made tractors out of. Oh, about 1940 or so, we're talking about a 1927, '28 model Dodge. There was a lot of those that were.

Bob Zybach: Were there any farms around here still using steam?

Neil Vanderburg: No.

Bob Zybach: They were all using gas powered tractors and horses?

Neil Vanderburg: Mostly horses. When we moved here my dad borrowed money from the FHA and they would not finance a tractor. They said tractors were not the way to farm. So they financed our horses and we farmed with horses. My dad's brother had a Fordson tractor in Fullerton, California, and my dad took the old '23 Dodge truck and brought that Fordson tractor back up and we used it. And they were very dangerous because they had a worm gear in the rear end that drove the thing, and so when you got on a hard pull the front end came up off the ground and it'd come right on over if you weren't on your toes. Especially if you were going up a hill and the front end was already light and you would hook a rock or a stump, you could get killed. But we did farm that place. And that old worm drive had a lot of friction in it. My brother-in- law Orval Cummings came into the family along about then, and my dad had gone to work for Bill Coote by then, and so my brother-in-law and I, we were plowing the place there, and we were driving it 24 hours a day, and at night you could see the rear end was red hot. . . I mean there was that much friction on the rear end!

Bob Zybach: Was it just down a foot or two below you, then?

Neil Vanderburg: You were sitting virtually on it! It was hot! I mean it could be a cold night but it was hot sitting up on that tractor! Yeah, at night the exhaust system would all glow and everything, everything was hot.

Bob Zybach: Would anybody use International or John Deere?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh yeah. Yeah. Same kind of a deal, they ran 24 hours a day around here. And the old Johnny poppers, they were of course noisy. You could hear them from 2 or 3 miles away all night long. And there was a lot of 1020 McCormick-Deerings around; that's what Mulkey farmed with, was 10-20 McCormick-Deering at that time. And they. . . the front ends on them stayed down a lot better than they did on the Fordson for some reason. I don't know why.

Bob Zybach: You say "Fordson." Is that common name?

Neil Vanderburg: It was a Ford tractor, yeah. It was made by Ford, but they called it "Ford Son."

Bob Zybach: You said that when they were building this road through here, Tampico Road, coming down from Smith Peak on the Berry Creek side where they've got that cutbank, that they used dynamite there?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, they used dynamite, and then they had a 60 Cat in here. And they called it a 60 Cat because it had 60 horsepower whether you needed it or not. And it was a diesel. They had a starting motor on it; they'd start the starting motor and get the Cat started. The blade was on the back so the guy running it was sitting with his feet one direction and his head the other one all day, and probably had a horrible kink in his neck, but that's the way they did it. And one interesting thing about this road going