Lessons from Oregon’s past

Once bustling centers of the logging industry,
residents abandoned the towns of Wendling
and Mabel as the timber supply dried up

Story by Katie Wilson
Photos by Mark McInnis and Ashley Baer

Mark McInnis / Photographer

An old school bus becomes part of the landscape in Mabel, Ore., just a few miles away from Wendling.

In 1920, the population of Wendling, Ore., was more than 800 people.

Now, it’s two.

For the past 78 years, Loyal Swofford has made his home in Wendling, a former wood products mill town located about 20 miles northwest of Springfield. The mill and its workers are long gone, but Swofford and his wife, Liona, have no plans to leave.

The demise of Wendling was not an isolated case. All across the West, towns that flourished with people and commerce have eventually dried up along with the natural resources that sustained them.

Mining and logging were the main reasons these communities cropped up, only to wither and die once the gold and silver were tapped out or the trees were cut and milled into lumber and plywood. These single-resource towns are prime examples of how unsustainable economic practices can affect the other two components of sustainability: people and the environment. They can serve as lessons for communities seeking to make themselves more sustainable.

When Swofford was born in 1929, Wendling was in its heyday. Booth-Kelly Lumber Company owned the city that he fondly refers to as a “sawmill town.”

Booth-Kelly built Wendling into a mini-utopia. Only workers and members of their families were allowed to live in the town, but the benefits were numerous. Wendling has its own railroad, schools, bakery, swimming hole, baseball field, tennis court and roads paved with wooden planks — a dream community for employees’ families.

“Many of the people that lived here when they were kids still say this is the best place they ever lived,” said Swofford, who is one of those nostalgic people. “Ten, 20, 30 years later, they still say it was such a wholesome and safe place to live.”

Anyone who questioned authority or posed a threat to the tightly knit community was fired from their job and forced to move out, because the lumber company owned all of the land, even the houses, Swofford recalled. There was only one murder in the community’s 26-year entire history.

Now, little remains of the great town that once was. Surrounded by overgrown wilderness, the Swofford’s house is one of the few original buildings that have been preserved since Wendling’s demise in 1946. The only part of the forest that is maintained is a small path of grass on either side of the road leading up to the Swofford house.

“I still want it to look like something,” said Swofford. “Up here it gets kind of scraggly.”

At 78, Swofford still mounts his lawn tractor and mows all the way from his house to the main road, a distance of almost a mile that takes him about two hours. He also prunes longer limbs on trees lining the road so that it is safe for visitors to drive around the sharp turns.

Right now, Swofford said the majority of his visitors are kids looking for a place to play paintball. Remaining concrete building foundations and the few big Douglas firs, some taller than 300 feet, provide perfect hiding spots for paintball wars. The downfall of the community didn’t come as a shock to most of the residents; most could predict it simply from observing their surroundings.

“I think most people knew that it was coming,” said Swofford. “The timber supply just ran out.”

Booth-Kelly, which also owned much of the surrounding forest, eventually felled all the trees and milled them into lumber. Although the land was left to reforest, that process take a long time — 40 to 50 years — to happen.

Swofford remembers sitting atop one of the fire lookouts and seeing no more of the older trees, which appeared darker green from his vantage point, only light green new growth.

Ryan Cronk / Design Editor

Weyerhaeuser Co. now owns the land where Wendling once was. Timber land owners are now required to replant young trees to replace those that are harvested. But it still takes 40 to 50 years or more for the replanted trees to grow big enough to harvest again. Today, the trees on Weyerhauser’s land are nearing an age where they might be logged again.

Weyerhaeuser forester Bonnie Covell is in charge of directly monitoring the growth of this area. According to Covell, mill towns in the 1920s were built right next to where the logging took place, because transporting logs long distances was challenging.

“Back then, they always logged the easiest stuff first and the hardest stuff last,” said Covell. “They never had the ability to take timber from far away. They were only looking at what was available right in front of them.”

Loggers would cut all of their mature trees before the new trees had time to grow back. When they had cut down all of the mature trees in their immediate area, their access to useable timber ran out, so mills in places like Wendling were usually shut down.

Mabel, Ore., a town just northwest of Wendling, suffered a similar fate.

In just a couple decades, all of the trees in Mabel were gone, and the town faded once the mill closed.

The “boom and bust” pattern of mills closing down is still prevalent today, although environmental restrictions that limit logging on federal forests have contributed to the decline in Oregon’s timber industry.

Mark McInnis / Photographer

Helen Anderson, who lives in Marcola, Ore., about 18 miles northeast of Eugene, goes for a stroll past the old schoolhouse she attended in the 1930s. The Mabel schoolhouse has since been turned into a grange for local residents.

Since 1998, there has been a 27 percent decrease in the number of mills in the state of O r e g o n , according to data from the 2000 census. Since 1993, the number of mills has decreased by nearly 60 percent in Oregon.

According to Stephen Williamson, a local historian and expert on the Mohawk Valley, where Wendling and Mabel are located, logging was about the only viable economic activity for the area.

The land there was too muddy for farming, he said. Most families in both communities were capable of growing only enough crops to feed themselves. Nevertheless, there were plenty of trees that grew very large in the lower-elevation hills and in Oregon’s abundant rainfall.

“The hills are smaller by comparison to most other areas in Oregon, and the timber is first-grade,” said Williamson. “That combination of easy access to the timber and great timber — It’s no wonder that the logging just exploded out here.”

Sustaining an entire community on one resource lends itself to eventual failure, Williamson said.

People saw the timber supply as endless, Williamson explained. They looked around and all they could see were huge Douglas firs, Western cedars and Western hemlocks.

When logging in the Mohawk Valley first began in 1896, loggers used handsaws to cut down trees and then transported them back to camp with a water powered mill. This kept the rate of logging slow, because it took loggers a long time to cut down each tree.

After World War II, there was an increased demand for lumber. With the invention of the gaspowered chainsaw in 1935, a team of loggers could take down a small forest in a few days. The supply began to seem finite.

The logging companies also used “splash dams” to float the logs from their original location downstream, where they would be picked up by trains and transported back to the public. They would dam a river, pile logs behind it, then blow up the dam, sending the logs raging down a stream or river to speed up the delivery of wood to mills.

The combined effect of the chain saw and speedier transportation accelerated the demise of towns like Wendling and Mabel.

Helen Anderson, 85, grew up in Mabel as it was transitioning from a logging hub to a deserted community.

Like Wendling, Mabel started as a small farming town in the late 1800s, but the soil in the valley floor proved too muddy for extensive farming. The Coast Range Lumber Company bought a small mill in Mabel in 1911, then ramped up logging and production at the mill. The population quadrupled over the following 20 years.

The town had a diverse population because the mill owner hired Japanese, Greek, Italian and Eastern European immigrants to keep labor costs down.

Robert Dollar, originally a lumberman himself and a part owner in Coast Range Lumber Co., acquired a steamship as payment for a debt and with it created a closed-loop economic empire.

The steamship would pick up immigrants from Japan and bring them to Mabel to work in a mill, quickly boosting the city’s population. Some of the harvested lumber was then exported back to Japan.

Anderson’s father was a logger. Nearly everyone who Anderson remembers living in Mabel worked in the logging business.

“For a tomboy like me, it was a real good place to grow up,” said Anderson. “We were always hiking and exploring.”

Three of her friends’ fathers worked as night watchmen in the mill’s fire towers. In a community with so many condensed trees, fire was a serious threat.

Sent by their parents, Anderson and her friends would run up to the mill at night. They would clock their parents in to work so they could stay back at home in front of the fire, playing card games.

During her exploration, Anderson also became aware that the logging and milling wasn’t going to last forever. “All the old growth was gone,” Anderson said. “I could only see hills with small trees.”

Anderson remembered when the company announced that the timber was gone and the mill would close in 1946. People immediately started packing up and moving out, in search of the next logging or mill job in places where the trees hadn’t been cut yet.

“Overnight the town moved out,” said Anderson. “The cue sticks were still hanging on the wall at the pool hall. The soap was still in the infirmary. It looked like if someone had the proper supplies they could cook a full meal in the cookhouse.”

The thriving city that Anderson once lived in was now near abandoned.

Today, Weyerhauser also owns much of the timber surrounding the now-abandoned Mabel. Its vast timber holdings in the Mohawk Valley are a key to the company’s economic success and a source of timber to meet America’s demand for lumber, plywood and other wood products.

Ashley Baer / Photo Editor

Loyal Swofford is one of only two people who now live in Wendling, Ore., a town, about 22 miles northest of Eugene, once owned by Booth-Kelly Lumber Company. Swofford and his wife, Liona, live in one of the few surviving original buildings since the timber company shut down its operation in 1946.

In 2007, consumers used 55 billion board feet of lumber, and the demand is expected to fall by only a few percentage points in 2008. Woodproducts companies will rely on the growing trees in places like the Mohawk Valley to meet this demand.

“We can do some particularly incredible forestry out there,” said Weyerhaeuser’s Covell.

Although most of the area was logged before reforestation was required or considered a good forest practice, “the trees grew very well naturally with minimal forestation, and with the intensive forestation now they are thriving,” Covell said.

The forestation department has developed many more management tools since Wendling and Mabel’s demise, such as more advanced processes for soil auditing and more efficient utilization of the logs once they reach the mill.

At the time of Wendling and Mabel’s downfall, logging companies were not actively trying to replant the trees that they took. In the 1940s and 1950s, Weyerhaeuser and other companies began using aerial seeding. However, they found that the seeds either took to the soil well, or not at all. Hand-planting of trees begin in the 1960s and continues today as a standard reforestation practice.

Weyerhaeuser manages its trees on a 45-year rotation period and replaces every harvested tree with a new one within a year. This way, they will never run out of trees while waiting 50 years for regrowth, like the loggers in the 1920s did, Covell said.

“Basically, Weyerhaeuser plans harvest more then 40 years ahead of time,” Covell said. “There is a mosaic of the different ages of trees. The trees are not all mature at one time, so there is a continuous stream of available lumber.”

With a more sustainable timetable of logging in mind, the company has few worries that history will repeats itself.

“We are not at all worried about sustaining this land,” said Covell. “With all of our tools that we use in the forestation now, there are more trees there than there would be naturally.”

Unlike Booth-Kelly Lumber Co. and Coast Range Lumber Co., most of Weyerhaeuser’s mills are located farther from the forest, usually in larger cities and towns, which are more diverse economically.

Other resource-dependent towns, such as Oakridge, 40 miles southeast of Eugene, have been affected dramatically by the decline of Oregon’s timber industry, but have not died out entirely. They have held on despite closure of mills that at one time were a key part of their economic success.

Oakridge was a thriving timber town from the 1940s through much of the 1970s and had about 5,000 residents during its peak. The town started to struggle when the nearby Westfir Lumber Co. mill closed in 1977. By the early 1990s, Oakridge had no mills left. The population has dwindled to 3,700.

Though it is fighting a waning population, city administrator Gordon Zimmerman said that the city has survived because of its stubbornness.

“This was a town who refused to die,” said Zimmerman. “There was enough potential and people who loved the land.”

The town, which is trying to remarket itself as a recreational destination, is “scrimping and scraping, trying to recruit businesses into its industrial parts and create jobs from people who are already here.”

It has also put as much money as it can squeeze from its budget into improving city facilities. A new amphitheater, library and improved public infrastructure are three recent additions that the administrators hope will lure new residents and businesses.

Approximately 200 Oakridge residents live in the city but commute almost two hours daily to and from Eugene for work, but becoming a bedroom community is not the town’s sole economic strategy, Zimmerman said.

“There is no single strategic plan, internally or externally,” said Zimmerman. “We are just trying to be prepared for when a company comes and we can add to their bottom line.”

Oakridge is confident that its location and ample recreation opportunities — camping, hiking, fishing, biking, boating, skiing and snowboarding — will attract the population it needs to sustain itself.

Even when its key economic resource fell through, Oakridge has held onto a portion of its population because of the dedication of residents. Wendling and Mabel, however, did not have the population base or economic diversity that Oakridge has has to stay afloat.

But Wendling does have Loyal Swofford, who plans on remaining true to his name by staying loyal to his hometown.