McCloud River Lumber Company
Have to devote a post to the lumber mill that my Dad and his partner logged for from 1965 until he retired in 1985. That is quite a long time for a contract logger and of course there were a few changes along the way. It was a bit interesting when I tried looking up information on the earlier mills like Hi-Ridge and J.F. Sharp, there simply isn't any. Most of these mills disappeared prior to the Internet and they were not big enough to warrant a historian, or a company photographer. They did not found a town, or provide the majority of the jobs for an entire town.
McCloud River Lumber Company was founded by two men, Scott and Van Arsdale in March of 1896, although it did not get that name until 1897. The key to success in logging the extensive pine stands around the new mill and to the east lay in building a RR to transport lumber over Snowmans Hill (a spur ridge of Mt. Shasta) to connect with the Southern Pacific at Sisson, later renamed Mt. Shasta City. In 1902 the holdings were sold to a Minnesota investor named Judson Carpenter and later came under common control along with three other lumber mills. Those mills were Shevlin-Hixon in Bend, Oregon - Shevlin-Clarke in Ft. Francis, Ontario and Carpenter-Hixon in Blind River, Ontario. The pine products were jointly marketed under the Shevlin Pine Sales name.
The McCloud mill was one of the largest in California and production usually exceeded 500,000 bd ft per day. In hindsight this kind of production did not consider the concept of sustained yield, even though at it's peak the company owned or controlled the timber rights on 600,000 acres which grew mostly east of McCloud. Although this was a large holding, the Red River Lumber Company mill in Westwood, CA owned or controlled over 1,250,000 acres of timber land and the two tracts abutted each other some thirty miles east of McCloud.
In 1963 McCloud River Lumber merged with U.S. Plywood Corporation who had a large mill and plywood plant at Anderson, CA just south of Redding, CA. which was about 60 miles to the south. In 1965 the company town of McCloud was sold and the era of employees living in cheap company housing ended. It had been a long, friendly relationship with the company taking care of all maintenance and proving heat and power. The company was often referred to as "Mother McCloud" , but like many good things it came to an end. In 1967 U.S. Plywood merged with Champion International, a large eastern paper producer. The timber lands were managed by Champion Timber lands and over the next few years the last stands of old growth fir were logged. The old style mill was no longer efficient, who needed two shotgun style carriages that could handle logs up to eight feet in diameter and returned so fast that setters could not ride them because of headache problems. A small log mill was built, but it never really worked out well and in the later seventies and early eighties logs were usually hauled to the Anderson, California mill, which is why most of the truckers in that time period were from the Redding area.
In 1979 the mill was closed, but was bought in 1980 by P&M Cedar, of Stockton, CA one of the largest producers of wooden pencils in the nation. Most of us are familiar with the yellow #2 pencil with the name Ticonderoga on it, but the market for those pencils was diminishing. The mill on the property closed for good in 2002, although it was not the original large log mill and had not been for a number of years. That ended a little over 100 years of sawmill activity in the town of McCloud, a pure company town, with the exception of the service station along hwy 89.