Our Family and Forests - A Field Guide for the Curious
Tracking how our family's interdependent relationships with forests reflect larger patterns - across time and space -
Introduction
All families have relationships with forests. They take many forms ranging from distant and anonymous to immediate and intimate. Where did the paper in that newspaper grow? From what forest did the water flowing from the tap come? How was a forest shaped by the business that just sent you a dividend in the mail? What nearby forest caused today’s high to be 96 degrees instead of 98? Our family is no different, except that its evolution and fortunes have been more deeply and lastingly interwoven with forests than many. In addition to benefitting from the many essential things that forests provide, forest interactions by family members have ranged from owners and operators of sawmills, investors, forest owners and stewards to choker setters, and timber cruisers. Regardless of the family, choosing to learn from these evolving relationships has the potential to tell us something more about who we are – as individuals, a family, a nation, and as a species. Plus, let’s not get too carried away, it might just be fun and interesting.
What follows is an attempt to pull together and share something of the story of the evolving relationships between our family and forests. How have they shaped us? How have we shaped them? I’ve tried to strike a balance between being thorough enough to make the work of writing and reading worthwhile, and keeping it concise enough that someone might choose to read and use it. Before launching forth, the following clarifications may be helpful:
- Scope - What this is is a simple exploration of an evolving relationship. Some effort is made to consider the ways in which the specific details of our family’s relationships fit into the large story of people and forests in North America. The aim is to stimulate interest and curiosity. Other resources are available for those who want to learn more. This is an invitation to collect and add more related information, as well as an invitation to explore – on the ground, through conversations, and between pages. What this is not is a detailed, comprehensive, or authoritative history. Inevitably readers will spot details that have been left out, and I invite them to help us make additions and corrections. There are many potential digressions, which I have worked hard to avoid.
- Field Guide? Assuming that you are more likely to get excited when given the chance to visit the forested spots where these events took place, each chapter includes information that invites you to get out and explore locations related to events described below. Many of these are, like this whole project, works in progress; your help is welcomed and encouraged in fleshing them out. The aim is to provide enough information to support a person’s interest in getting out for some on the ground exploration, without sharing enough to detract from the adventure.
- What About the Women?! - I’ll be surprised if readers don’t find themselves asking “what about the women?”. We all know that the women in the family played – and still play – important roles in what happened and happens, even if the accounts available to us share few or none of the details. While we can’t rewrite the narratives that our understandings depend on, there are actions that we can take to correct the imbalance. One example is capturing Aunt Mike’s interesting accounts of the adventures of being the mill manager’s wife in a company town (see appendix). For all of these women, life was not easy and credit for their husband’s accomplishments should rightly be shared. As couples and families adapted their lives to engage in forest-related opportunities and responsibilities, each had and have their own unique approach. The following observation from Orrin Ingram about his wife’s attitude toward making yet another move summarizes the approach that he took: “..but I was decided in my plan, and she, as she always has done, acquiesced”.
- And the Forests? – It would be all too easy to make this a human centered project, relegating the forests to a role similar to an unimportant stage backdrop – uniformed and uninteresting. For many reasons this would be a mistake. Accordingly, efforts will be made to integrate information about the unique qualities of the diverse forests our family members worked with. In all cases, these were dynamic forests in transition – often rapid transition. This is a story of communities – human communities and more-than-human communities.
- Value Judgments – Though it is all too easy to pass judgment on what might have been right or wrong about forest shaping choices made by our predecessors, I feel that it is important not to do that, for a number of reasons. Firstly, what could be accomplished by passing such judgments? Secondly, it seems counterproductive to judge events that took place in the past by the societal standards of today. On the other hand, I do feel that it is constructive and appropriate to propose that a positive aim of our family’s evolving relationship with forests should be to encourage treatment of forests in ways that maintain and/or rebuild the vitality and resilience of both the forests and the related human communities. In some cases, family members’ decisions have left places and people poorer and with fewer opportunities, and it seems appropriate to make the value judgment that, going forward we should aspire to improving options for places and people.
- So What? Why should we know, consider, and care about these stories? One simple reason is to capture and save them before we miss the chance. We will each reach our own conclusions about why these stories are – or are not – important, but here are mine. We are fortunate and have been given many things, including secure lives, supportive families, and the opportunity to pursue many things in our lives. As a believer in the wisdom of the advice to “forget what you give, remember what you are given, and be mindful of where it came from”, I want to have resources that help me with that final encouragement. My efforts are fueled by my belief that there is value in being mindful about where we’ve come from, and to use that understanding to inform and guide future choices.
- A Framework – We’re all ready to get on with this story, but before setting out, one more explanation is in order. The story of our family’s relationships with North America’s forests fits well within the larger sweep of Euro Americans’ interactions with these forests. One way to consider and get our arms around both stories is to break it into a progression of five phases. Each phase reflects people doing what they thought made most sense at the time. The transition from one phase to the next was driven by problematic imbalances in the current phase which called for change – EG “we have just cut our way to the Pacific ; what’s next?”. Though we should be careful not to get too carried away with theory, I hope that this framework might shape and structure this project in positive ways. The five sections of the document reflect each of the five phases. Should an excellent, readable history of the relationship between people and forests in the United States be of interest to you, I recommend The American Canopy.
Part One – Too Many Trees –
When settlers arrived in North America from Europe they faced and met a range of problems. The problem that is most pertinent to our story was the problem that they wanted to and needed to establish farms but were challenged in doing this by forests covering the lands. If “save the old growth!” is a common cry today, “save us from the old growth!” might have been a reasonable plea when John Hayes and his companions settled in what is now Dover, NH in roughly 1680 (Field Trip – FT-1). Accustomed to farming in the open landscapes of the British Isles, it must have been daunting to begin the work of clearing the forest to create spaces to farm. Though in modern times we look on forests and trees as valuable resources, they saw the trees primarily as a problem that had to be overcome. At the same time, they of course also relied on the forests of the New England coast as providers of essential resources as well – timber for building homes, barns and fences, fuel to heat their hearths, habitat for the wildlife that fed them. Eventually, once the adequate land had been cleared of unwanted forests, settlers came to look on the forest in new ways.
FT 1 – Dover, New Hampshire – John Hayes emigrated to Dover, New Hampshire from Scotland in about 1680. Much more detail may be found in John Hayes of Dover, 1936 by K. Richmond. There are at least two tangible reminders that an explorer can find. One is a historical tablet located near the intersections of Littleworth Rd. and Industrial Park Rd., on the outskirts of Dover. The other is his gravestone in the Pine Hill Cemetery.
FT 2 – Southwick, Massachusetts – Accounts differ on the question of whether OH Ingram was born in Southwick or in Westport, the larger town to the north. At this point we have no additional information on such details as where the family lived, etc.. Who will research this one?
Part Two – West to Opportunity –
As frontiers opened and technologies allowed, New Englanders did what so many humans have done, throughout time and across the world, they looked for opportunities to remove resources from the landscape to support and enrich themselves by selling them. Forests shifted from being a problem to be solved to being a resource to be valued and used. Of our several family members who took advantage of these opportunities, Orrin H. Ingram is the most notable example. By a combination of good fortune and shrewd hard work, he surfed the wave of westward forest opportunity from coast to coast. Though his story is well told in Downriver, his autobiography, and other biographical write ups, here is a summary.
Born in southwestern Massachusetts in 1830, Orrin grew up quickly and in tough circumstances (FT 2). His father died when Orrin was eleven. His mother was unable to support the family and was forced to “farm out” Orrin to nearby farming families. After working for room and board until he was seventeen, through family connections in the area near Lake George, NY, Orrin was hired by the Harris and Bronson Lumber Company in 1847 to work in their sawmill at Pharaoh Lake in the forests of the eastern Adirondacks (FT 3). As an ignorant teenager he started out at the bottom of the employment ladder, being paid $12 per month and learning the many details of maintaining the remote, rudimentary, steam powered sawmill. At this time, the primary forests of the Adirondacks were a rich mixture of a variety of conifer and hardwood species. Perhaps more research can lead us to the best surviving examples of these forests.
A detail that is significant to his story is that Orrin’s lucky break of getting a job in the mill coincided with the early movements of the growing timbering industry off of the east coast and into the vast forests spread across the continent. A number of key ingredients, including technological innovations, growing populations and demand for lumber, transportation networks, and political agreements aligned to make these westward expansions both possible and attractive. He was at the right place at the right time.
If accounts are to be believed, Orrin quickly proved to be a hard, reliable worker and a person with both ambition and a unique aptitude for maintaining, fixing, designing, constructing and operating sawmills. Business people taking advantage of logging and milling operations on the timber frontier needed and valued people like Orrin and accordingly opportunities came his way. Over the next seven years, from 1850 to 1857, Orrin worked for a succession of milling operations that were representative of the movement of the timber frontier into the forest-rich Great Lakes region. His work involved designing, building and managing a succession of mills progressing from smaller and less sophisticated to larger and more complex, and moving geographically from east to west. Some of the lumber travelled through canal systems to be sold into US markets along the Hudson, while other lumber was shipped down the St. Lawrence Seaway to England. The timber frontier was developing and moving westward quickly, and Orrin had the characteristics that filled essential needs. In eight years he made the transition from being a green teenager earning $12/mos. to the manager of one of the world’s most productive sawmills earning $4,000.00 per year.
It is understandable that Orrin’s interests would shift from working for others to setting out to take advantage of opportunities for himself. By this time, he was married to Cornelia Pierce, whom he came to know during his time in the Lake George area. In 1856, he took a brief leave of absence from his work as a mill manager and made a trip to Michigan to investigate options for developing his own business. Though he returned with the conclusion that Michigan was not a good option for him, his interest in engaging with opportunities to the west remained strong. By 1857 the ingredients came together to allow him to exercise his entrepreneurial spirit in the forests to the west. Teaming up with Mr. Kennedy, who provided important industry experience, and Mr. Dole who brought both experience and essential capital, operations were established in the tiny, frontier town of Eau Claire, Wisconsin in the heart of the remarkable white pine forests of the Upper Mississippi Valley, on the banks of the Chippewa River.
Success required a good wood supply, facilities for turning logs to lumber, markets, and transportation networks to get the wood to markets. Their mills were built on the banks of the Chippewa River, and rivers served as a crucial key to success. Logging was primarily done in the winter, with logs hauled by ox teams to the frozen river banks to await spring’s melt. Once the rivers broke up, the logs were rafted downstream and collected in the millpond, which was created in an abandoned oxbow of the river. Taking advantage of Orrin’s excellent skills in designing, building and operating sawmills, the logs were sawn into lumber and then assembled into large rafts which were floated forty miles down the Chippewa to its confluence with the Mississippi. The rafts were pushed downstream by paddle wheel steamers, stopping at towns to sell lumber, until it was all sold. In an era before the building of infrastructure, like trains and trucks, to transport heavy shipments over long distances, Orrin’s system made effective use of the natural infrastructure of river networks to make market connections. A second important factor was that the beginning of this process coincided with the westward expansion of settlers along the Mississippi and further west. The development of farms in treeless plains required lumber and Orrin and company found ways to profitably fill that need. Though it is easy to think of the timber frontier as something that moved only westward, this example and the earlier information about Canadian lumber traveling south to market in New York shows that the flows of people, their industries, and wood moved in many directions.
In addition to the market challenges that Orrin had to meet, there were many other significant challenges. During the summer months, the water level in the Chippewa River dropped low enough that the lumber rafts could not be floated to the Mississippi. Orrin solved this problem by designing, building and using a number of lumber litters that used air chambers attached to the barges to allow them to require less water. Because Orrin and his partners were far from alone in recognizing and capitalizing on the opportunity to bring the white pine to market, competition was another challenge that they had to face and overcome. The competition took many forms, one of which was that many companies made use of the same rivers to transport their logs, floating loose, to their downstream mills. This demanded systems for keeping track of whose logs were whose, and ways to sort your logs out from those of others as they floated through town. As is well described in Downriver, there was intense conflict and competition for spaces to capture and store logs in this highly competitive, frontier industry. Orrin maintained lifelong relationships with many of these fellow lumbermen as they made the transition from serious competitors into eventual cooperators and partners.
Orrin Ingram’s business involvements in the Chippewa River Valley took many forms, with a succession of different milling companies and logging operations. In the period between Orrin’s arrival in 1857 and 1900 Eau Claire grew from a tiny, pioneer village surrounded by expansive forests into a major city with sophisticated industries and culture. Orrin likewise made the transition from being a young, poor sawmill man living in a rooming house and risking his future on a huge project, into an established, wealthy man, living in an impressively ornate mansion, and serving as a prominent citizen in the city and region. Though this distilled accounting may give the impression that the events in his life flowed easily from one chapter to another, it is important to be clear that they did not. The evidence clearly indicates that he worked very hard and strategically and committed himself, his family and his businesses to large risks and uncertainties in order to accomplish what he did.
Of all of the challenges that Orrin faced, the largest was the final one. As inexhaustible as the white pine forests of the Upper Mississippi may have seemed, they were not. By the early to mid 1890s the forests that made it all possible were gone. Like miners who come to the end of their coal seam, Orrin and fellow lumbermen needed to find an answer to the question of “what’s next?”. Because Orrin had moved west from the forest operations of the Adirondacks and the Great Lakes well before the lands had been cut over, this was his first experience of facing the challenge of “what’s next”. Though he made his home in Eau Claire until his death in 1918, the evidence suggests that his allegiance was greater to capital and using investments to continue to grow his fortune than it was to any one place. Following the exhaustion of the forests and the shutting down of the mills, he made investments in a number of areas, some forest related and others not. His forest investments went in two directions, south and west.
In the same way that he looked west from the Ottawa area and identified opportunities in the Upper Mississippi, with the help of business associates he identified new opportunities in the deep south. This led to his investing in a number of lumber operations including the Ingram-Day Lumber Co. of Lyman, Mississippi, the Louisiana Central Lumber Co. of Clark, Louisiana, and the Louisiana Long Leaf Lumber Co. of Fisher, Louisiana. Family involvement as investors in these operations or their successors continues to this day.
For Midwest lumbermen scanning for the next forest opportunities at the turn of the century, the most attractive possibilities were to be found in the large, lightly cut conifer forests of Oregon and Washington, in general, and the checkerboard forestlands granted to the transcontinental railroads by the federal government as incentives for building these lines, in particular. Success in capitalizing on these opportunities challenged the westward looking lumbermen to raise capital in excess of what any one of them could individually generate. With Fredrick Weyerhaeuser as their leader, a consortium of former competitors came together to finance the largest land transaction in US history. In 1900 the Weyerhaeuser Company purchased 900,000 acres of forest land in Washington for $5,400,000.00 . At the time the company was established, Orrin was the third largest shareholder. In addition to this involvement in Northwestern forests, Orrin eventually invested personally in both forest lands and a sawmill in Willapa Bay in SW Washington. Letters written to the local papers reflect the frustration that locals felt in having “eastern capitalists” buy up their sawmills and then refuse to operate them. In a letter written late in his life, in reference to his Pacific Coast investments, Orrin reflected that he knew what needed to be done, but lacked the energy to it. In a remarkably short amount of time, North American timber frontier had moved from coast to coast, following a pattern of mining forests and moving on. Through a combination of luck, strategic, entrepreneurial zeal, and hard work, Orrin Ingram played an active role in important chapters of this important episode in the nation’s history.
By the end of this era, much of the primary forest from the Atlantic coast through the upper Mississippi had been liquidated and plans were in place to continue the process to the Pacific shore and the Gulf of Mexico.
In his later years, Orrin was fortunate to have active support and assistance with managing his business affairs from his son-in-law, Dr. Edward Hayes. Though Dr. Hayes was never directly involved with forest-related operations, he was capable with financial management and retired from his medical practice in Eau Claire in order to better assist his father-in-law. Two of Dr. Edward Hayes and Miriam Pierce Hayes’ children, Ruth and Edmund, would carry on the family’s involvement with forests, moving, with the timber frontier, on to the Pacific coast.
In 1921, Ruth Hayes married Donald McGraw, who grew up in a timber estimating family from nearby Chippewa Falls. Following his graduation from the University of Wisconsin in 1906, he accepted a job with a Kansas City based insurance company. The young couple chose to settle in Portland, where he worked in the business of insuring sawmills until his retirement in 1945.
Ruth’s brother, Edmund, was similarly drawn to opportunities in the Pacific Northwest. Tellingly, or ironically, Edmund was born in the same year as the final big year of logging and milling in the Chippewa Valley, 1895. Following his education at Princeton and Harvard’s business school and service during WW I in the army, in 1920 he came to Washington state to work for the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and test his interests in working with forests. Thanks to family involvement with the company, he was taken on as a young trainee under the strict and experienced wing of George Long, the company’s powerful general manager. Over the course of one year he was exposed to work in crucial dimensions of the world of timber and wood – timber cruising, logging, sawmilling, and sales. His experiences are well chronicled in his excellent biography, Boxing the Compass, by his son Phil.
The summer of 1920 found him working as a compass man cruising timber on Boistfort Peak in the Willapa Hills of southwest Washington (FT7). He left behind these first impressions of northwest forests: “Some of the fir is a sight to behold; great towering giants that are almost beyond description. It seems a shame to even think of cutting them down but it is probably far better than to allow them to windfall as they all eventually do”. This final comment reflects an opinion that my grandfather and many of his fellow lumbermen held throughout their lives, that old forests are decadent and it is important to log them and convert them to “thrifty plantations”. To do otherwise would reflect irresponsible stewardship. He emphasized this point to me when we took walks in the forest in the ‘70s. This same summer he also worked on another crew cruising the much different Ponderosa pine in the company’s new investments in southern Oregon’s Klamath Falls region. The next step in his training was to serve as the purchasing agents for Weyerhaeuser’s sawmill in Snoqualmie Falls, where his duties included overseeing the assignment of workers’ families to company-owned homes. This opened his eyes to the nature of politics.
During the time he was in Snoqualmie Falls, Edmund’s sister, Ruth, now living in Portland, fulfilled her sisterly duty of introducing him to Anna Wheeler, who would soon become his wife. The next step in Edmund’s training was an assignment to work in the company’s sales division based in Minneapolis. He found this work to be his least interesting to date and was pleased to leave it when he was called back to Eau Claire to help with family business related to the death of his grandfather, Orrin Ingram. By the time these duties were completed, Anna and Edmund were the parents of a pair of baby boys, Ned and Fred, and faced decisions about where they would live and what they would do.
By this time, Edmund had clearly decided that his future would lie with the forests of the northwest, but he was uncertain of whether he wanted to work for the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. Resources that he had inherited as a result of his grandfather’s death, left him with a variety of options. He and Anna decided that they would follow Ruth and Don McGraw’s example by settling, with their growing family, in Portland. In the late 1920s Edmund made the important decision to enter into the timber and lumber business as an independent operator. As a young, energetic man driven by entrepreneurial spirit, he bought rights to timber, built a small sawmill and began to saw and sell lumber. Clackamas Fir Lumber Company was located near the tiny community of Beaver Creek, Oregon, eighteen miles southeast of Oregon City (FT-9). Edmund bought the logging rights to timber owned by Edward Swift, of the Chicago-based Swift meat packing family. Thanks to able, knowledgeable help, he assembled a small mill from used parts, and logging and sawmill crews. This operation represented the final days of the pre fossil fuels era of cross cut saws, and steam powered locomotives and mills. The greatest challenge that Edmund encountered was the 1929 crash of the stock market and the beginning of the Great Depression just as the business was assembled and ready for operation. Though it was a struggle, he was able to nurse the operation through the tough economic times, providing workers with essential income and selling lumber into a very depressed market.
Edmund and Anna’s three sons recall their first hand memories of the vivid sights, sounds and smells of this simple, but efficient, logging and milling operation. I recall my grandfather’s account of learning that the Wobblies were walking toward the mill along the rail line with the aim of persuading the workers to unionize. To literally head this possibility off, Edmund walked down the line, met them, and succeeded in persuading them to turn around. Given that this business operated on the same principles as OH Ingram’s had in the east, “find valuable timber, cut it, and move on”, by 1939 the depression was easing and markets were improving, but the timber associated with the mill had been cut and Edmund had to answer the familiar question of “what’s next?”. He had learned important things and was ready to apply them to new ventures.
Edmund’s next business project was on a larger scale and accordingly required the capital and help of partners. Working with his neighbor, friend, and experienced timber operator, Robert Noyes, and his brother-in-law, Don McGraw, plans came together to work in partnership with Eugene-based Booth-Kelly Lumber Company to establish a logging and milling operation in the Row River area, southeast of Eugene (FT10). Booth-Kelly owned the timber and the Portland-based partners had the expertise and capital needed to make the project a success. And with the help of high quality timber and a steadily improving economy, amplified by demand for high quality lumber for wartime ship building, the mill was a quick success – emerging free of debt after just two years of operation. Bob Noyes oversaw the logging operations, while Edmund was responsible for the mill and sales.
During this period, two important transitions were being made. The first was the transition from the pre fossil fuel technologies of human powered saws and steam powered transport and milling to the new, more efficient world of chainsaws, crawler tractors, and trucks. The Row River project represented the transition into new options and efficiencies. The second transition was driven by the realization that both the Pacific Ocean and the end of abundant old growth forests were in sight. Though lumbermen would find lucrative business opportunities from logging and milling old growth in the northwest for many decades to come, as he worked at Row River, Edmund’s mind was working ahead imagining the transition within the industry from the by now so familiar “cut it and move on” approach to models based on recognizing the value of the land, replanting, and staying put. He and fellow lumbermen had long felt external pressure from citizens and the federal government who were concerned about the negative impacts of logging and the potential impacts of “timber famine” caused by aggressive cutting and minimal replanting. In response to the Depression, section 10 of the National Recovery Act called for the development of systems for replanting cutover lands. Recognizing that the shift toward longer term forestry would require new resources and expertise not possessed by the lumber companies, Edmund persuaded fellow lumbermen to work with him to create an organization that came to be called Willamette Valley Tree Farms. With participating companies sharing the costs, the organization’s small staff included a trained forester and nursery crew that assisted the participating companies and others in learning how to replant and care for their lands. Phil Hayes described the situation in this way: “First, with timber values rising, they saw that it might make investment sense to assume the fire risk, pay taxes, and grow trees on land that had no other economic use. Second, they faced the stark realization that to do anything less than reforest was a recipe for eventually going out of business”. Beginning in 1938, Edmund reestablished his relationship with Weyerhaeuser Timber Co. with his election to their board of directors. This was a reflection of both his proven expertise in the business and the company’s policy, at the time, of having members of the significant shareholding families be represented on the board. The then president of the company, Phil Weyerhaeuser, took notice of what Edmund and his cooperators were doing with supporting the transition to reforestation in the Willamette Valley and asked Edmund to help the company’s staff better understand what was being done. According to his notes, these conversations eventually contributed to Weyerhaeuser’s creation of the expansive Clemons Tree Farm in the Willapa Hills in 1941.
The reforestation era had a primary focus on replanting of forests, but a secondary priority was improved approaches to preventing and fighting wildfire. Fire is a vital and challenging dimension of the relationships between people and the forests of North America and it deserves more attention than will be given here. Catastrophic fires brought tragedy and devastation as the timber frontier moved west – Minnesota’s Hinckley Fire in 1894, the famous Big Burn on the Idaho-Montana border in 1910, and the Tillamook Burns in ’33, ’39, ’45, and ’51. All shaped the landscapes and memories, of the nation in general and members of our family in particular. As a child growing up in Gearhart, Mike Hayes remembers the Tillamook Burn turning the sky black at midday and watching the black soot roll up in the surf. Out of the disaster came opportunities, and Edmund played an active roll in encouraging the use of the burned lands as a laboratories for demonstrating the power of scientifically informed reforestration.
Edmund, Don McGraw, and Bob Noyes would continue to own and run the Row River mill until its sale to Booth-Kelly in 1948, but one of the most important transitions in the relationships between people and North American forests was already well underway. An industry with high allegiance to capital and little or no allegiance to places had cut its way from coast to coast and new approaches were called for. Edmund saw this coming, saw opportunities and responsibilities related to the new era, and took leadership to ease and encourage the transition.
FT 3 – Pharaoh Lake, New York – The site of the first sawmill where OH Ingram worked is on this lake. It is located about five miles east of the larger Schroon Lake. Ironically, or tellingly, the site of his initial foray into industry is now a wilderness area. A web search will lead you to plenty of information. Who will be the first family member to return? We welcome a full report. Is evidence of the mill still visible. Clear descriptions of his arduous first trip to the site are included in OH’s autobiography.
FT 4 – Lake Ontario North Shore – Brewer's Mills on the Rideau Canal is the site of the first of the 7 or so mills Ingram built or managed in Ontario and Quebec between 1850 and 1857. Other mills were there too, and a brewery, but no evidence remains of industrial operations. Belleville, on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Moira River, was his next stop, where he built 3 mills in 2 years. It remains a significant town, with little trace of the many mills built there between 1790 and the 1850s. In 2006 Anna went looking for the site of his next mill, described as being 9 miles from Belleville on the Moira River. She found a street called "Old Mill Park" off Mudcat Road east of Foxboro, with a large grassy park next to the river - the old millpond? For a glimpse of what those mills may have been like, a water-powered mill has been restored and remains in operation at the O'Hara Mill Homestead near Madoc. Finally, he managed 2 mills on the Gatineau River, about 9 miles north of Ottawa, field trip potential unexplored.
FT 5 – Eau Claire, Wisconsin – There is much to be found and enjoyed during a visit to Eau Claire, including family homes, the millpond and mill site, excellent information at the historical museum, and, of course, the boneyard. A good resource might be Peter’s “A Day in Eau Claire” powerpoint including maps, photos, etc..
FT 6 – Willapa Bay, Washington – Little is known about the specific details of OH’s investments in this region, other than they included both forest land and either a mill or a mill sight. While researching his masters thesis, Peter Hayes stumbled upon letters to the editor of the local paper in which locals vented their frustration with eastern capitalists who bought up important resources but then failed to support local economic vitality through operating the resources. The Pacific County Historical Society may be a good place to start.
FT 7 – Boisfort Peak, Washington – This hill, located in the northeast section of the Willapa Hills was the area where Edmund Hayes worked as a compassman on a timber cruising crew during his formative first summer in the Northwest. More on the ground exploration is needed, but the assumption is that the area that he cruised is currently industrial timberland. For comparision’s sake, Edmund’s letter cite the wood volume at the time of his cruise as being over 190,000 board feet to the acre. Maximum volume for current industrial management, with stands growing to 40 to 50 years is roughly 18,000 BF/acre. To find it, find the village of Boisfort, located to the west of I-5 and south of hwy. 6 and go southwest. It is a highpoint that shows on many maps. Who will check it out?
FT 8 – Snoqualmie Falls, Washington – Two generations of the family worked for the Weyerhaeuser Co. in this town. Edmund served a short stint as the mill’s purchasing agent in the fall of 1920. Fred and Mike Hayes and their family lived here from 1965 to 1969, during which time Fred served as the mill manager. Let’s get them to take us on a tour.
FT 9 – Clackamas Fir Lumber Company – This was the site of Edmund’s first sawmill. The site is near the community of Beaver Creek. Ned and Sis found and visited the site in the 1990s and reported that it, at that time, was the site of a Llama ranch. Ben works with a man who lives next to the site and is happy to help us.
FT 10 – Row River Lumber Company – Phil’s Boxing the Compass places the mill at 12 miles east of Cottage Grove and roughly four miles beyond Doreena. At this point, we do not know how the site is currently used.
Part Three – Staying Put –
In this new world of choosing and learning to grow trees in perpetuity, Edmund’s energies were directed in three main directions – increasing involvement with Weyerhaeuser, participation and leadership in industry-related organizations, and personal experimentation with the new world of tree farming. Having served on the company’s board of directors since 1938, he accepted the invitation to become a vice president and serve on the board’s executive committee in 1951. This coincided with the Washington-based company becoming increasingly active in Oregon, and through the remainder of his career, he served the company as an Oregon-based representative. During this same period, he became increasingly involved with leadership roles in the several organizations that faced the difficult task of helping the legendarily independent, organization adverse lumbermen accept the importance of working cooperatively. Involvements included serving as chairman of the West Coast Lumberman’s Assoc. and being active on their conservation committee.
Responding to his unquenched entrepreneurial spirit and his commitment to the newly emerging models of post frontier forestry, he once again teamed up with Bob Noyes to create a new business venture. In 1944 they purchased 5,000 acres of cut over and second growth forest in the northern Oregon Coast Range, near the small town of Olney, and established their Elk Mountain Tree Farm. Rising values for wood and improved access to seedlings opened the door to experimenting with the economics of the newly birthed tree farm model. Through careful stewardship, they developed and improved the land, and demonstrated, to themselves and others, that staying put could be a viable business model. The land was eventually sold to Crown Zellerbach Corporation.
Of Anna and Edmund’s four children, three of them, Fred, Ned, and Phil had active, professional involvement with forests and forest products as important parts of their lives. Throughout her life, their sister, Cornie, has been actively involved in important and rewarding work beyond the world of forests. The nature of the three brothers’ involvements reflects their living in the transition period between the “cut it and move on” phase and the succeeding “tree farm” phase focused on reforestation and innovations in maximizing tree growth in plantation stands. We unfortunately do not have biographies of these three – yet – to direct you toward. What follows are short summaries of key aspects of their involvements with forests. Much more may be learned through interesting family conversations.
Ned Hayes – Throughout his childhood, Ned, and his brothers, watched and learned from their father’s involvement in forest projects. Their many chances as a young boys to accompany their father on inspections of mills and forest operations left them with vivid memories and an appreciation for the sights, smells, sounds, and human characters. As a result, all three have carried a sense of appreciation of and respect and reverence for forests and human work in forests and mills that have lasted throughout their lifetimes. As an adult, Ned’s forest involvements took three main forms – logger, business owner supporting the paper industry, and forest owner. Directly following his service in the Navy in WWII and his subsequent graduation from Yale University, Ned chose a path that could have inspired Ken Keasey’s famous novel; he came home and went to work in the woods. Initially he worked as a choker setter, the lowest ranking job, for a classic, gyppo logging outfit – DRB Logging. He lived in a low rent hotel in Eugene and worked, again as a choker setter,. He reminisced about the crew joking that the initials stood for “dirty, robbing bastards”, and never forgot waiting on a downtown Eugene street corner, hours before daylight, for the crew’s crumby to swing by to pick him up. The crew washed away the effects of a long, hard day by making alternating stops for beer and milkshakes on the drive back to down. Follow this education and employment, he was hired to work at one of Weyerhaeuser’s final residential logging camps, on the west slope of the southern Oregon Cascades, near the town of Sutherlin. It was the end an era marked by big trees, powerful logging equipment, creative, colorful coworkers, mountains of food in the cookhouse, and much hard work. Moving from the cutting of trees to the sawing of logs, Ned also worked for several years at Seattle Cedar’s sawmill in Ballard, Washington. This gave him exciting exposure to both the forests of Vancouver Island’s west coast, where the majority of the wood came from, and the wonders of milling large, beautiful old growth cedar logs – destined for such premier uses as Pocock rowing shells.
Ned’s major professional involvement was his ownership and management of CWS Grinding and Machine Works. He bought the small, but well established, business, located in what is now the heart of Portland’s trendy Pearl District, in the mid 1960s. He carefully and creatively adapted and expanded the business to the point where it was the primary provider in the Northwest of services that reground and resurfaced the large, steam heated rollers that are central to pulp and paper mills. Through this work, he maintained and expanded his active interest and involvement with the region’s forest products sector. In 1986 Ned sold the business to a larger scale competitor, which continued to provide essential services.
Upon retirement, Ned, with the support of his wife, Sis, took advantage of opportunities to become involved with forests in new and hands on ways. In 1986 he purchased a 160 acre forest in the upper Nehalem River, near the town of Timber (FT-14). Because the land had been selectively logged in innovative ways by previous owners, it provided Ned with an excellent chance to experiment with multi value forestry. In subsequent years, Ned expanded his forest ownerships to include what eventually became the 550 acre Mt. Richmond Forest (FT-13) and the 70 acre Manning Forest. Working with consulting forester, Mike Barnes, and various contractors, Ned took the many steps needed to develop the three properties into well established, working forests and forest businesses. From the beginning he worked successfully to involve his children and their families in the projects.
Fred Hayes – Throughout his life Fred has had active and varied involvement with forests and forest products manufacturing. His activities deserve a more thorough account than is possible here, but here are some highlights. Soon after graduating from Princeton University in 1949, Fred signed on as a compassman on a Weyerhaeuser crew cruising the company’s stands of old growth timber. Military service as an artillery instructor at Fort Sill, Oklahoma interrupted his work in the woods, but he soon returned to the world of sawmilling in the Northwest. 1952-’53 provided an immersion in the pleasures and challenges of sawmill operation and lumber sales when he worked at Seattle Cedar Lumber Co.. Ned followed in his footsteps the following year. From 1953 through 1969 Fred served in Weyerhaeuser Company in a progression of positions with increasing responsibilities: Klamath Falls (from shift foreman to the night superintendent), Springfield (sawmill and plywood plant superintendent), and Snoqualmie Falls (area manager overseeing two sawmills). This was during the period of high production in the woods and mills of the region when cutting of the primary forests was coming to an end. One symbol of the end of the big log era was the replacement of the Snoqualmie Falls’ mill’s eleven foot head rig (primary saw), shortly before Fred became the manager. Thanks to his efforts, one massive wheel from that saw still stands as a monument and reminder in down town Snoqualmie.
Following a pattern similar to his father and great grandfather, Fred left Weyerhaeuser in 1969 and launched his own wood products venture. Working with the operator of a small alder sawmill on Tacoma’s waterfront, he reactivated a set of dry kilns, started Western Dry Kilns Inc. drying, surfacing, and selling alder and other hardwood lumber. Though he learned important lessons, in 1974 Fred sold the business and moved on. He bought Van Vetter, Inc, a high quality metal fabrication business, Van Vetter Inc., operating it from 1974 until its sale in 1985.
Desiring to “get back into the tree business”, in 1991 Fred purchased 200 acres of second growth forest land on the western slope of the Olympic Mountains, near the town of Forks. Incorporated as Hoh River Tree Farms, the forest was mainly cedar and alder in the low wetlands and hemlock dominating the uplands. It provided a range of opportunities and challenges. Over the next thirteen years, Fred worked with local contractors and his family to enhance the land through road building, logging, thinning and planting.
Phil Hayes – Phil’s active involvement with Northwest forests was in many ways similar and parallel to his brother Fred’s. His work with the Weyerhaeuser Company was also an important, meaningful, challenging and formative part of his life. From 1957 until 1971, Phil held a progression of increasingly responsible positions with the company: Cottage Grove sawmill (assistant superintendent), Raymond sawmill (superintendent), Aberdeen (sawmill manager), Longview (plywood plant superintendent), Coos Bay (plywood plant superintendent), Enumclaw (sawmill superintendent – with Fred as his boss), and Tacoma (manager of West Coast sales). Like Fred, Phil came to know the business well during a high production period of its history. By 1971 he decided to leave the company and pursue other business opportunities. He purchased Washington Belt and Drive Systems Inc. in 1972 and actively managed it until his retirement. This brief summary of the three brothers’ forest-related accomplishments is not complete without acknowledging the essential roles that their wives, Sis, Mike, and Sally played. Through all of these relocations, reassignments, and periods of business entrepreneurship, they adapted, supported, bore and raised kids, ran households, made friends, and adjusted to new circumstances. I’m confident that their husbands respected, admired and appreciated the ways in which all three did this difficult dance.
FT 11 – Elk Mountain Tree Farm – The tree farm was located in the very northern Oregon Coast Range, near the town of Olney. The family archives, generously cared for by Henry and Kim, include a solid collection of maps, letters, and other records that can help a person both find the land and better understand their goals and management approaches. It is assumed that the land is now in industrial ownership and management.
FT 12 – Hoh River Tree Farms Inc. – This 200 acre second growth forest land was owned and managed by Fred Hayes from 1991 until 2004. Located in the coast fog belt near Forks, Washington, the land supports a mix of cedar and hemlock. To learn more, contact Fred.
FT 13 – Mt. Richmond Forest – This is the largest of Ned’s three forests and is located on the divide between the Tualatin and Yamhill watersheds, near the towns of Cherry Grove and Gaston. The 750 acre forest covers the north slope of the mountain and rises 1,000 feet from the Tualatin River to the hilltop. The Hyla Woods crew is happy to arrange a visit.
Part Four – More Than Trees –
It makes logical sense that the “cut and move west” phase led on to the tree farm – single resource single revenue stream phase explored in the previous section. It is equally understandable that tensions would arise from the tree farm, agricultural crop phase that would led toward a fourth phase. While nearly all northwesterners recognized the value and importance of the intensive plantations that were being grown where the primary forest had once stood, many also expressed their belief that the forests of the region, public and private, should be managed in ways that provide public values, such as protecting water quality and providing some level of fish and wildlife habitat, in addition to growing wood. In response to these pressures, managers began to shape forest stewardship in ways that did more to provide multiple values to both themselves and the larger community. The multiple use management of US Forest Service lands are an example of this approach. During this period, the intensive tree farm plantation approaches were modified, primarily through state forest practices regulations, to provide a slightly wider range of values, in addition to saw logs. The approaches that Ned chose to take with his three forests were representative of this fourth, multi-value, single revenue stream phase of forestry. Since the end of the “cut and move on era” the forestry our family was involved with had had goals that were wider than exclusively the growing of timber. One particularly interesting and early example of this is the role of Anna Hayes’ maternal grandfather, Philip Schuyler, in the designation and development of Portland’s water supply, the Bull Run. The focus of this forest stewardship was water, not extractable timber, and here is the sad story of how he became involved. In the late 1800s, Philip and his wife, Lucy, lived in Portland with their three children. At that time, the city’s drinking water was collected from the creeks that flowed out of the nearby west hills. With a growing population there was increased risk of pollution in this water. This came home to the Schuyler family when the youngest daughter, Emily, died of water-related typhoid in 1885. The family was heartbroken and Philip acted on his grief by becoming one of the most energized advocates for securing a permanent, high quality water supply for the city. Within a year a committee began planning and by 1895 reliable water was flowing out of Portland’s taps from the new Bull Run Watershed. To this day, the Bull Run serves as an excellent reminder of the ways in which we depend on forests for much more than wood.
While Ned emphasized the value and importance of the trees in his forests, he also was a strong believer that a true forest is about more than trees. During his roughly twenty years of leadership, Ned successfully worked to restore a wide range of native vegetation, enhance habitat for fish and wildlife, and provide improved opportunities for recreation and education. Through his actions, Ned embodied Aldo Leopold’s encouragement to treat land as a community, to which one has responsibilities, as opposed to looking on it as a commodity. Though Ned found great pleasure and fulfillment in his work with the forests, he seemed to accept that it was unlikely that his approach of enhancing the many values of the forest in an environment that only financially rewards the forest owner for one of those values, logs, was unlikely to be appealing and transferable to many other forest owners. This imbalance between goals and financial incentives could be addressed in either of two ways – either shift management back toward the tree farm plantation approach with the goal of improving financial return, or find ways to diversify and expand revenue streams to better align goals and financial incentives. This quest for ways to make the transition to this fifth phase is the subject of our final section.
When Scott Ernest sized up the many qualities of his future wife, Julie Hayes, high on the list was that she was the only girl her knew who owned – and wore – a Weyerhaeuser belt buckle. Scott has sawdust in his own veins, thanks to his father’s long involvement in the upper Midwest paper business with Kimberly-Clark Corporation. Both Julie and Scott were drawn to forests, but with their move from Seattle to Spokane in 1994, distance made hands on involvement with the Hoh River Tree Farms nearly impossible. But the ten acres of land on which they settled near Colbert, Washington, north of Spokane provided welcome opportunities to experiment with practical forest restoration on a manageable scale.
The Colbert community benefited when Scott developed and pursued an interest in wildland fire fighting. Through this involvement with his local fire fighting district, Scott developed knowledge and skills and became a Fire Fighter, an EMT1, and a reliable, skilled leader in the fire fighting community. This work deepened and broadened Scott’s respect for forests, fire, and responsible forest stewardship. Wanting to expand on and apply their forest stewardship lessons, in 1998 Julie and Scott searched for, found, and purchased 94 acres of forestland, forty five minutes drive from their home. The forest is representative of the exciting mix of tree species found in these inland forests – Ponderosa pine, Lodge pole, Hemlock, Cedar, Western white pine, Western larch, Spruce, Alpine fir, and Douglas fir. Their Storm King Forest is bordered on two sides by the US Forest Service’s Priest River Experimental Forest. They feel that this proximity adds significant value and interest to their land and efforts. Working toward their goals of improving the forest’s health and diversity, they laid plans for regular work trips to the forest. Life conspired to make these trips less frequent than planned so that by 2014 they realized that additional help, equipment, and expertise were needed. Accordingly, in 2015 they connected with able, reliable contractors who completed an overdue thinning project to Julie and Scott’s specifications. This resulted in improved forest health, reduced fire risk, good work for local loggers, logs for local mills, and a boost to the owners bank and beer accounts. One additional benefit is that Julie and Scott’s enthusiasm for the land and the work involved has been reenergized.
Julie and Scott value what they have learned from their adventures in land stewardship and underscore the important opportunities that so many of us have with the lands we own – or may someday own – to experiment with what it means to be responsible land stewards, regardless of the land’s size or context. Given how our family’s forest journey followed the national trend from one ocean to the other, Julie and Scott’s forest work in Idaho and Emily Hayes’ settling in Montana suggest that perhaps our family frontier is headed back to the Atlantic?
FT 14 – Timber Forest - This is the northernmost of Ned’s three forests and is located on Lousignont Creek in the upper Nehalem River. The 160 acre forest is located along Timber Rd., south of hwy. 26 and north of Timber. The Hyla Woods crew can help you with a visit. Ask Alex, Abby and Jack about their adventure with the yellowjackets!
FT 15 – Storm King Forest, Idaho – This 94 acre forest, owned and cared for by Julie and Scott Ernest provides an exciting chance to learn about forests and forest management in the Inland Northwest. It is located north of the town of Priest Lake, Idaho and adjoins the historically and ecologically interesting USFS Priest Lake Experimental Forest. To learn more and/or to arrange a visit, contact Julie and Scott Ernest.
Part Five – Here for Good – Multiple Values and Multiple Revenue Streams:
Way leads on to way. Edmund’s forest-related accomplishments were informed and supported by what his parents and grandparents had accomplished. The good work done by Fred, Ned, and Phil built on and was boosted by their parents’ good work. As we have seen, the priorities and foci of their forest-related endeavors, shifted and evolved from generation to generation, but what endured was the pattern of sizing up the situation, assessing what might best be done, and then trying to do it. The evolution of family involvement has closely paralleled the larger patterns and trends in the larger relationships between people and forests in North America.
As Ned approached his eightieth birthday and acknowledged his declining energies, he faced the decisions about the future of his forest lands. He asked me, his son, if I had an interest in taking the lead on carrying the project on. Pam and I seriously deliberated and decided that they would accept this rare opportunity. Both Anna and I had been shareholders for many years and had been actively involved as much as they were able. We respected the progress Ned had made since 1986 in systematically rebuilding the forest’s ecological health and increasing its value. Looking at the regional trend toward simplification of the once diverse and valuable forests into single species, single age plantations, and the related loss of public forest values, Pam and I, with the support and encouragement of Anna, asked ourselves whether it might be possible to build on and adapt Ned’s approaches in ways that improved the economic returns. Doing this would make such approaches more appealing to other forest owners and useful to the region. Might we work with consumers and others to shift from multiple value – single revenue stream models, that are inherently unstable, to new, more balanced approaches where forests provided many values and the landowner was rewarded by multiple revenue streams? Could we move beyond forest owners having to make the bad choice between either growing an ecologically vital forest or an economically profitable one? Why not have both? My service on Oregon’s Board of Forestry from 2008 to 2012 further convinced him that the region faced an important, unmet need for this type of forestry innovation, on both public and private forests.
Since 2005, experimentation has been pursued. The three forests, organized as two businesses have been combined into a single, recognizable entity – Hyla Woods. Eight main strategies have been identified, researched and pursued as the best route to growing forests that are both ecologically complex and adequately profitable. They are: 1) improved silvaculture, 2) improved wood markets, 3) improved markets for values other than wood, 4) gaining and using important, new knowledge, 5) developing and benefiting from new partnerships, 6) reducing dependence on both fossil fuels and toxics, and, the key to all success, and 7) the development of a community-wide conservation ethic. This experimentation is made possible and is informed by the work of generations who have gone before. It works on the belief that forests have been good to us, so perhaps we have the opportunity to try to return the favor? Way continues to lead on to way. Though it is unclear how successful Hyla Woods will be in achieving its goals, three generations of the family continue to work to develop approaches that work well both for their 1,000 acres and for the larger goal of aligning what we ask of forests with the realities of what they can provide – over the long haul. The work continues.
FT 16 – Hyla Woods - Three forest near Forest Grove, Oregon now make up Hyla Woods. A small sawmill and solar dry kiln operate on the hilltop in the Mt. Richmond Forest. Information may be found at www.hylawoods.com. Visitors are most welcome.
In Conclusion
For the time being, this brief recounting has run its course. We’ve travelled across time – 330 years, and across space, from coast to coast. In bringing this to an end, I notice several things. A walk through one of the older sections of the Hyla Woods forests today brings us into dense, heavy forest made up of a jungle of many species of trees and other life. A question comes to my mind – how different does this forest feel than the forests that settlers first fought back on their arrival in New England? The commonly believed story is that those New England forests were pristine – untouched by human use and manipulation. We now know that this is not true – that humans had lived in, depended on, manipulated, and co-evolved with those forests for thousands of years. In the same way that we aspire to have the Hyla Woods forests become both multi value and multi revenue stream, the forests that John Hayes and company cleared in the 1680s were examples of forests and people that had already achieved that goal. Native people understood, valued and used the forests for a remarkable range of life sustaining things – food, water, medicines, heat, clothing, shelter, boats….. . If that is the case, perhaps this story should best be considered not as a linear – point A to point B - story, but as a circular story where we end up back at the point where we began? A story of co-evolution between a culture and the forests of a continent – with way leading on to way – working toward a balance of living compatibly with a landscape and one another - asking no more of it than it can reasonably provide? Though conclusions about what it all might mean are best left to the reader, the hope is that we might have expanded your knowledge and stimulated your imagination and curiosity. An added hope is that this will become a living and evolving document that will expand and improve as new materials are discovered, mistakes are corrected, gaps are filled, and adventures had. Your help is invited, welcomed, and encouraged.
