Re: Weyerhauser mill


[Follow Ups] [Post Followup] [Dodge Power Wagon Forum]


Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 at 2:18PM :

In Reply to: Weyerhauser mill posted by Russ/Wyo on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 at 1:26PM :

No, the "A" Mill was in Everett, WA. It shut down around 1982. I had just moved here when they dynamited the smokestack. Everett was basically a Weyerhauser company town from about 1910 to 1980. Most of the mills all along the waterfront were Weyerhaeuser mills, from Mill A at the far south end, to Mill E, a huge lumber mill at the north end. The last one to close was the Kraft (brown paper) Mill which was responsible for the same stinky air and water pollution as the Kraft mill in Tacoma. All those properties were bought up by the Port of Everett, who has yet to do anything much with them, but refuses to sell them to anyone who will.

I had a neighbor who'd worked as a welder there during the war and he said they men always wondered why they never got called up for the draft. They didn't find out until after the war that the pulp they were making (the mill shipped raw pulp rather than finished paper) was going to a gunpowder factory and they were considered a "critical defense industry".

I remember the Rayonier mill at P.A. too. It was bought by the Japanese ("Diashawa" or some such) quite a while ago, as was the massively-subsidized dissolving pulp mill at Sitka, Alaska. I think they might both be closed now. I've been told that sitka spruce makes the best dissolving pulp, and western hemlock is a close second. The other species have too much pitch. My same neighbor, during the depression, cut hemlock pulp logs and sold them to the Lowell Paper company (also in Everett). He had to deliver them to the mill, peel them, and chop all the black knots out of them. For all that, he got $5/cord, which had to cover buying the trees, cutting them with hand tools, hauling them to the mill, and removing all the bark and black knots with an axe. And that mill wasn't even making dissolving pulp. They made writing paper and paper bags.



Follow Ups:



Post a Followup

Name:
E-Mail:
Subject:
Message:
Optional Link
URL:
Title:
Optional Image Link
URL:


This board is powered by the Mr. Fong Device from Cyberarmy.com