OTHER Sierra Nevada Wood & Lmbr...

SIXTY YEARS OF THE SIERRA NEVADA WOOD & LUMBER COMPANY

Walter Hobart was a Nevada mining man who saw lumber production as a sideline to the Comstock Lode silver mining. The lumber company he founded ended up lasting longer than the silver boom did.

In 1873, Nevada State Controller Walter Hobart and former Nevada and California Surveyor General Seneca "Sam" Marlette were operating a small sawmill in Little Valley, a secluded valley between Incline Village and the Washoe Valley. This sawmill cut mining timbers and shipped them to Virginia City by means of a two and half mile V flume that landed the timbers, rough lumber on the Virginia & Truckee Railroad.

The partners were investors in and provided a lot of the lumber and timbers being used to build the Virginia & Gold Hill Water Company flume which took water from above Incline Village and Marlette Lake through the Carson Range by tunnel. From the top of the Washoe Valley, the water went into seven miles of 12" wrought iron pipe, down 1720 feet and back up again in an inverted siphon.

The construction boss of this work was John Bear Overton who would later, as superintendent, become the absolute final word in the operation for Hobart & Marlette, while still running the Water Company in Virginia City.

In 1876 Hobart & Marlette moved their mill, following the ever moving front of falling trees further up into Little Valley. In addition to lumber, thousands of cords of firewood were cut for use in the Comstock Lode. In 1878 they incorporated into the Sierra Nevada Wood & Lumber Company.

The Comstock Lode had hundreds of steam engines that were hungry for four foot split pine and fir, using in excess of 100,000 cords a year. Most of the wood was cut from the tops of trees cut for lumber, but young trees of every size were also cut.

Lakeshore industry

By November of 1879 they had finished construction on a new larger mill at Crystal Bay on the northeast shore of Lake Tahoe. They referred to it as Overton Bay, because it was J.B. Overton who was in charge of building the sawmill and would run all of the operations. Crystal Bay was actually named, not for its clear waters, but for George Crystal, who filed the first timber claims in the area in the early 1860s.

The SNW&L had bought and leased over ten thousand acres of timberlands along the eastern mountains of Lake Tahoe. The Ponderosa and Jeffrey Pine trees weren't as large as those found further west in the Sierra Nevada, but these tight grained Carson Range pines made strong timbers to hold up the earth in the ever deepening stopes and shafts under Virginia City.

The sawmill's circular saws first cut into logs that were cut in the hills above Crystal Bay, and the lumber was used to build the mill buildings, bunkhouses, cookhouse and other needed facilities on what is now Mill Creek. By the time full operations were underway in early 1881 over 250 loggers, swampers, millmen, woodcutters, camp tenders and mechanics were at work at the mill.

Transportation was a challenge that required some inventiveness. Wagon roads were built from Washoe Valley over the mountain to bring in supplies.

A similar road was built up and over the ridge west of Incline Village to Hot Springs, then over the hill to Truckee. Heavy machinery generally was freighted by wagon to either Glenbrook or Tahoe City, then by steamer to Overton.

To get the logs from the forest to the mill, oxen skidded the logs through the rough terrain to dry chutes, which were made of two parallel saplings, where horses would speed them to either the mill, the lake, or later, railroad landings. Donkey engines, which are steam powered winches were also in use to snake logs down the ridges and ravines to landings in the 1890s.

The Incline Railroad

Once the lumber was sawn, it was loaded on to small railcars, and these cars were lifted up the mountain by the famous Incline Railroad. The incline was built in 1880, with the 8000 feet of cable weighing 14,000 pounds, taking almost a week to haul and ship from Truckee.

The lift was 1400 feet vertically and the rail line 4000 feet long.

As four loaded cars was being hauled up on the endless cable by the steam engine located at the top, four empty ones was let down the other rail, adding to the efficiency of the operation.

The trip took about 20 minutes with one and a half cords of wood or 1500 board feet of lumber being hauled each trip.

Within two months of the incline's opening, the first major accident occurred.

Two loaded cars were being hauled uphill, when suddenly, a loud noise startled the mill workers.

The cable on the 12-foot bullwheels hummed and shook, and the lumber cars that were nearing the top, stopped their uphill climb.

Slowly at first, then picking up speed quickly, the cars flew downhill.

There was nothing to be seen but a streak of fire and smoke streaming out behind the cars. They held the track, thanks to the cable, but that meant they were going all the way to the bottom. There mill hands scrambled to get away, stumbling and tripping in their haste.

The cars hit the bottom of the incline, smashed up the head frame, then launched into the air, and burst into a stand of pine trees with an earth shattering explosion. Metal and wood were splintered into small pieces, with boards piercing the trees to a depth of 8 inches.

The cause of the wreck was attributed to the operator over winding the wrought iron clutch. Apparently Overton's clutch design was less than perfect, as seven cars ran away and were wrecked before a new rachet and cog system was installed preventing any car from dropping further than four inches.

At the top of the incline, the lumber was dumped into a large wooden V flume that carried it south to the Virginia & Gold Hill water tunnel. There the lumber floated through the mountain in its own flume in the 3994 foot long tunnel, then down into Little Valley, landing on the Virginia & Truckee Railroad at Lakeview Station, on the divide between Washoe Valley and the Carson City.

Loyal employees

Hobart's operation hired experienced loggers from all over the west, including many from Truckee. Charley Barton, a master logger who logged for many lumbermen in the 1870s, started logging on contract for SNWL in 1883, and started a family relationship with the company that would last for decades.

Working as a contractor for the SNWL was veteran Tahoe-Truckee lumberman Gilman Folsom, who had been a partner in a sawmill at Clinton below Boca from 1870 to 1880.

In 1880, Folsom partnered with Sam Marlette and they took up a 40,000-cord-a- year wood cutting contract that employed over 400 men year round, and starting contract logging for the company the following year.

The SNW&L also hired Chinese workers, mostly for menial tasks and wood cutting.

As Truckee area lumbermen were being boycotted by white laborers for hiring Chinese workers and were responding by firing the Chinese, SNW&L took the opposite approach and hired more Chinese and fired the whites.

By 1883, SNW&L owned 70,000 acres north of Truckee in the Prosser, Sagehen Creek and Little Truckee River. Rumors constantly circulated around Truckee in the 80s and early 90s that Hobart was going to buy an existing sawmill or build a new one and start logging these forests.

While the Carson Range lands were the center of Lake Tahoe operations, Walter Hobart continued to invest in timberlands on the north and west shores of Tahoe. Enough timber had been purchased to last to 1900 if all went according to plan.

The future looked very bright. - Gordon Richards, The North Lake Tahoe Bonanza

 

more SNWL

INCLINE VILLAGE, CIRCA 1800: LAND OF LUMBER AND FERTILE SOIL

The Sierra Nevada Wood & Lumber Company was Lake Tahoe’s second largest lumber operation, operating at Incline Village on Crystal Bay from 1880 to 1895. The story of Walter Hobart’s empire continues, picking the story up in the mid 1880s.

The village of Incline, the sole owner and business being the SNW&L, had applied for a post office upon moving to Lake Tahoe from Little Valley in 1880. It took four years for the Post Office to grant a fourth-class office with Gilman Folsom as postmaster. The village near the mill, containing a store, a boardinghouse, a stable and a few cabins, also had daily steamer service in the summer and weekly service in the winter. Now it was on the map.

Winter was tough on the men and the company, with most of the work stopping and the mill closing down after the last logs were cut. Woodcutting continued through storms or blue skies. Most of the loggers and millmen spent the winter on ranches in the Nevada valleys. In the winter of 1884 a mile of V flume on a trestle some 80 feet high, was blown down up in Little Valley, but was rebuilt in the snow in only eight days.

By 1884 Gilman Folsom was cutting sawlogs on the southeast shore of Lake Tahoe. These logs and others from around Lake Tahoe were rolled into the lake, cabled together to form rafts and towed by the steamboat Niagra to Sand Harbor. The log landing at Incline was too sandy and unprotected, so Sand Harbor was chosen for the log landing. There the logs were pulled by steam engine onto narrow gauge flatcars that were hauled back to the sawmill by a wood fired locomotive.

A garden paradise

Surprisingly, the area around Incline, with its mild climate and good soil, was an excellent garden spot. SNW&L had acres of gardens that solved the problem of shipping in fresh food from the Carson and Washoe Valleys. They grew potatoes, onions, lettuce, corn, cabbage, turnips, radishes, and several acres of grain and hay for animal feed.

When the grain field was first cleared, it was early in the spring, and just as they were ready to plant, Captain Joe, Chief of the Washoe, came to Gilman Folsom and told a tale of woe. “Once, all this land was ours. We killed the deer and bear all over the mountains. When the white man came he took away all our land, except this one little spot, where the creek comes down the mountain. Here we came to camp and hunt rabbits and catch fish. Here we lived every summer and we buried our dead. Now you want to take this one last little resting place from us.”

Folsom and part owner Sam Marlette were too tender-hearted to resist the pleadings of the eloquent children of the forest and so they abandoned the field, and moved uphill a mile away where they cleared another field for grain. That pleased the Washoe it seemed, at least for that season.

The following year however, Captain Joe was willing to forego his ancestral summer home for a $20 gold piece. Both fields were then planted to feed the hungry lumbermen.

Another of the Truckee area lumbermen who were attracted to the quality operations being run by Hobart & Marlette was James “Nat” Durney. Durney sold his Truckee grocery store in 1884 so he could manage the general merchandise business in Incline.

This deal was worked out because Sisson Crocker Company, who had operations all over the western forests, had contracted to run all of Hobart’s woods crews, with Durney managing that operation as well. After a few years saving his money, Durney moved on to own his own sawmills and stores and was a millionaire by 1910.

SNWL kept a fairly tight rein on alcohol in the company-owned town. Still, a man needed to blow off steam and Tahoe summer resorts didn’t appreciate their hard-earned money. A few backwoods dives with watered down tarantula juice could quench that thirst after work, but for a real good time the men rode or walked over to Truckee, keeping that town and sometimes its jails quite lively. The biggest Truckee shindig was when the season ended, and all the workingmen descended on the dozens of saloons with the seasons wages in their pockets.

The enemy of wood

Fire was always a fear in the sawmill, as the combination of dry sawdust and kerosene lamps caused disaster when they came together. So it was no surprise that on June 21, 1886, Captain Overton received a telegram in Virginia City telling the mill was on fire. As with most sawmills, there was inadequate water supply and the mill went up in flames.

Even though timber was becoming depleted, and Virginia City mining had dwindled to a trickle, the sawmill was quickly rebuilt and new machinery installed. Lumber production of about 12 million feet a year resumed in a month.

Forest fires were common in the summer, either set by lightning or most often smoking woodmen or campers. When blazes ignited, the logging and mill crews dropped their work, grabbed fire tools, and responded to the fire lines. Most often these fires were ground fires and could be quickly put out with hand tools and good organization.

Steam power along the lake

By the mid 1880s lumbermen all over the west were turning to narrow gauge railroads to move sawlogs through the mountains. Hobart & Marlette were no exception. In 1881 they built a 2-mile spur that ran from the mill to the west toward the California state line. They even designed a new style of flatcar axles, one that had coupling in the middle, so the log cars could go around sharp corners easier.

In 1888 they started extending the rails south to Sand Harbor, completing it the following year. This allowed them to use the protected bay for unloading log rafts. The log trains rumbled along the lakeshore on a shelf carved out of the rocks above the lake, a route that would eventually become Highway 28.

With Charley Blethen running the original locomotive, a second engine was added in June of 1889 to the Sand Harbor run. The new rail line and additional locomotive were the result of the depletion of timber around Crystal Bay, and Folsom’s opening of new logging operations near Zephyr Cove. Folsom even named his new town Hobart to keep on the good graces of Walter Hobart.

Throughout the early ‘90s logging and wood cutting continued full force. The steamer Niagra made frequent trips towing logs from Zephyr Cove to Sand Harbor. The incline and flume were taxed to full capacity to keep up with the demand for lumber.

There were no changes upon the death of Walter Hobart Sr. in June of 1892, as his son Walter Jr. took over the management, assisted by a corps of lawyers and advisers. The $800,000 estate included the untouched timberland north of Truckee. It was only a matter of timing to start the relocation.

Preparing to move

By the end of 1893 timber was scarce and operations began to wind down. In 1894 SNW&L sold the flume to the Carson & Tahoe Lumber Company -- the Bliss family lumber operation at Glenbrook, that was itself starting to see the end of logging on the horizon. The move was accelerated by a trade of 5,000 acres of timberland that SNW&L owned between Lake Tahoe and Truckee and traded to the Truckee Lumber Company. The Truckee Lumber Company gave an equal amount of land north of Truckee, adjacent to the lands that had been bought by Hobart 20 years earlier.

The year 1895 was a year of preparation, as the last of lumber and firewood was shipped, and a crew of surveyors and engineers looked over the land north of Truckee for a new mill site. They soon narrowed down the sites to a flat glacial outwash just north of Prosser Creek, a few miles north of Truckee.

Gilman Folsom took on the task of dismantling the railroad, the sawmill and any other salvageable parts for the new mill. The incline stayed, but just about everything else was loaded onto barges and shipped over to Agate Bay, where it was loaded onto wagons. They even created a temporary town there called “Bay City.”

The teamsters coaxed their oxen along as they hauled the heavy wagons over the summit, through the Martis Valley, stopped to quench their thirst in Truckee, then headed north to the new lumber camp of Overton.

By the end of 1897, Incline was a ghost town. The Washoe returned to claim the gardens, and the forests began to grow again. But the story wasn’t finished. - Gordon Richards, The Truckee Sierra Sun

 

an ongoing series?

BUILDING THE NEW TOWN OF HOBART MILLS

TRUCKEE, CA -- The Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company had its roots in 1873 when Walter Hobart Sr. and Seneca “Sam” Marlette started cutting timbers for the Comstock Lode and the Virginia City water system. They operated a sawmill at Incline on the northeastern shores of Lake Tahoe from 1879 to 1894. Lumber was hauled to the mountain using an incline railroad, giving the area its name.

In 1896 the old machinery from Incline lay scattered around a large flat spot on the north side of Prosser Creek, some five miles north of Truckee. Tents were mostly in evidence, as the sawmill and town site were just being staked out.

A seven mile standard gauge railroad from Truckee was under construction, supervised by Captain John Bear Overton, the long time field general of the SNW&L at Incline. Two standard gauge locomotive engines were at work building the new line, as were many of the loggers and millmen. The new town would be named Overton to honor the captain’s dedication to the company.

Overton, or Hobart Mills as it would soon become known, was laid out on the best modern engineering. It would still be Overton today if not for the Post Office denying that name, as there were too many Overtons already in use. The streets were wide and graveled, it had excellent water pressure with fine pure mountain spring water, had a modern sewage system, electric lights, a fire department and all the requirements of a large isolated mountain town.

The construction work was well supervised by Ab Spencer, who was a master at his trade.

No stranger to lumbering

The immediate area around Hobart Mills was no stranger to lumbering. The flat area below the town was named Katz’s Flat for Fred Katz, a logger of the 1870s who logged the Prosser Creek timber up to just above Hobart Mills.

A reservoir had been built downstream from Hobart Mills by Gilman Folsom when he was partners in the Pacific Lumber & Wood Company at Clinton below Boca. It provided a head of water for sawlogs that were floated down Prosser Creek and the Truckee River to the sawmill.

Just upstream from Hobart Mills was the Nevada & California sawmill, built by Seth Martin in 1872, but owned and run by Oliver Lonkey of the Verdi Lumber Company since 1874. A ‘V’ flume from this mill, plus an old flume from the Banner Mill on Sagehen Creek, passed right by the new town. Lonkey’s mill was still running while Overton was being built, and may have provided some of the lumber for the first houses.

The land that Hobart acquired came from a variety of sources. He bought land from the Central Pacific Railroad, U.S. government lands, other lumber companies, Civil War veteran land scrip, homesteaders and other timber claims. He later bought timber from the Forest Service.

William Tiffany

The man who gets credit for putting together some 70,000 acres of virgin pine and fir timberlands was William B. Tiffany. Tiffany was an experienced lumber and wood man who ran his own operation in the Truckee River Canyon below Floriston in the 1870s. Hobart hired him to cruise timber, survey land lines, measure water resources, and buy the land ahead of others. He had a head for figures, rarely wrote much down, but could remember the smallest detail.

Tiffany spent years hiking the forests of Lake Tahoe, but had especially focused on the lands north of Truckee from Alder Creek, Prosser Creek, Sagehen Creek, Independence Lake, Webber Lake, almost to Sierraville and to the east to Stampede and Sardine Valleys. The virgin forest contained over 1.5 billion board feet of lumber and millions of cords of wood.

Hobart’s plan had always been to hold off logging these thick forests until other lumberman cut off the easy timber and prices rose. Both Hobart Sr. and Jr. understood the organization and attention to detail that was required to build a run such a large operation and make a profit.

A great enterprise

The flurry of activity at Hobart Mills in 1896 was impressive. The railroad broke ground on July 6, and was completed to Overton on Sept. 7. A 1,000-foot wooden trestle, later replaced by concrete and steel, was built over Prosser Creek, right over the reservoir created by Gilman Folsom 25 years before.

By October of 1896, George Giffen was making daily trips on the new line. Work on the narrow gauge logging line that ran into the forests was also under construction, utilizing the Incline rails and locomotives. Giffen had the honor of running the former Virginia & Truckee railroad’s engine, J.W. Bowker. This Baldwin-built locomotive had been hauling the lumber of the SNW&L for years from the company’s lumber yard at Lakeview Station, the end of the long flume from Incline.

The Bowker is still around, having been preserved rather than scrapped. It was a Hollywood favorite, and was used in 1939 for the filming of De Mille’s classic, “Union Pacific.” It also starred in the movie version of The Wild Wild West, and is now in the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

Work on the sawmill commenced on September 20, and the sawmill began operations on July 31, 1897. The saws were set up to cut 130,000 board-feet a day, a huge amount for the time, and additional capacity was soon added. This was industrial logging and lumber production on an immense scale, far bigger than the Incline operation.

The 16-foot long logs were run through a band saw capable of slicing a seven-foot diameter log. Smaller logs were cut directly on circular saws, followed by gang saws that cut the lumber into one- or two-inch thick boards. Further trimming produced strong fine lumber.

Visitors to the sawmill and factory were constant. It became a popular part of mountain vacations to stop for a night at Hobart Mills Hotel and tour the mill. A catwalk carried a visitor’s gallery over the whirring saws, providing an excellent view. Guests were amazed at the speed and efficiency at which logs were turned into lumber.

A very diverse operation

The largest amount of rough lumber was planed into fine grain, finished pine lumber, and most of that was used to make wooden boxes. In the days before cardboard and plastic, just about everything was shipped in wooden boxes. The majority of the boxes were used in the California agriculture business, for shipping fresh citrus fruits and vegetables eastward on the railroads.

An example was an order from Southern California for 999,000 orange boxes that filled 222 railcars, and took 111 days to fill. Other portions of the massive factory that ran year-round were used to produce doors, windows, paneling, flooring, and a variety of finished furniture.

A separate small sawmill was in operation on Alder Creek from 1901 to 1904. It was connected to the Hobart standard gauge railroad by a two-mile spur. In addition to logging pine for lumber, white and red fir were cut into four-foot lengths, split and cured in piles out in the forests. When dry, the wood was transported to the Floriston paper mill.

The sawmill and factory complex was powered by a self-feeding, sawdust fired steam plant, whose five boilers powered two large steam engines that ran the machinery and the electric plant. The larger of the two engines was named Beast, while the smaller was called Beauty.

Water for the boilers, sawmill, and town came from Hobart Reservoir, located a half mile to the north. The reservoir was fed by a three-mile pipeline from Sagehen Creek. It supplied 120 pounds of pressure, enough to power direct current electric lights and small machinery.

A huge field of piled lumber was always air drying in the flat to the south, and wood fired dry kilns cured the lumber to perfection. One of the first large shipments out of the yards didn’t go very far. Three million feet were sent to Floriston in 1899 and 1900 to build the town and the Floriston paper mill.

But after that, pine lumber was shipped all over the West, and regularly to the east coast. Sailing and steam ships took it across the Pacific Ocean, such was the demand for Sierra Pine.

Once Hobart Mills was up and running, life settled down to a predictable and profitable lifestyle. - Gordon Richards, The Truckee Sierra Sun

 

Whats cool is how many of their locos still exist!

Check out my Hobart Estates roster on my "H" page.

At least 5 of them!