Bly, Oregon

Early Settlers and the First Sawmills (1870s-1920s)

In the late 19th century, Bly was a remote ranching community in the Sprague River Valley of south-central Oregon. Early homesteaders built their barns and cabins from hand-hewn logs and shakes, with only very small whip-saw mills or Indian Agency mills providing limited lumber locally. One of the first steam-driven sawmills in the region was set up by Colahan around 1885 on Bly Mountain, later moved to the White Ranch west of Bly and run by A. J. Fitch. By the 1890s, a few portable mills (such as a mill operated by Jesse Parker just west of Bly) supplied rough-cut lumber for local use. These primitive sawmills were small and seasonal, as there was no practical way to ship large quantities of lumber out of Bly's isolated valley before the railroad. For the most part, Bly remained a quiet frontier settlement of ranchers through the turn of the century, its buildings made from local timber but no large-scale logging industry yet in place.

This began to change after 1905, when the surrounding forest lands were brought under federal protection (first as part of the Fremont Forest Reserve). Timber speculators, including the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, had acquired vast ponderosa pine tracts in the region in the early 1900s. However, without transportation, these stands stayed largely untouched. Everything hinged on the arrival of a railroad to haul lumber to distant markets. Bly's transformation from ranching hamlet to logging town truly began in the late 1920s, when the steel rails finally reached the valley.

The Railroad Arrives and a Logging Boom (1927-1930)

The Oregon, California and Eastern Railway (OC&E) - a logging railroad promoted by Robert E. Strahorn - gradually pushed east from Klamath Falls in the 1920s. Construction reached the end of the line at Bly on November 24, 1928, at last connecting Bly to the national rail network. Almost immediately, timber companies swarmed in to tap the vast pine forests that blanketed the surrounding mountains. In mid-1928, even before the rail line was finished, the Pelican Bay Lumber Company announced plans to build a private logging railroad south of Bly and establish a large logging camp in the woods. By January 1929, Pelican Bay crews were already grading their spur line; by March 1, 1929, they had 7 miles of track laid into the timber south of town.

At the same time, the Ewauna Box Company (a major mill in Klamath Falls that made wooden boxes) purchased a 37,000-acre tract of old-growth pine east of Bly (the Booth-Kelly timber block) and began building its own railroad line toward Quartz Mountain, northeast of Bly. By the fall of 1929, Ewauna's logging railroad extended about 18 miles east from Bly over Quartz Mountain into that timber area. The first trainloads of logs rolled into Klamath Falls from the Bly country in spring 1929 - Pelican Bay Lumber Co. made its first shipment of raw logs to the sawmill on April 13, 1929. Ewauna Box soon installed switching tracks at Bly to interchange their log trains with the OC&E main line. Within a year or two, Bly was transformed from a sleepy ranch village into a bustling logging hub, with locomotives chugging in and out daily and fresh-cut ponderosa pine logs piled high at the rail siding.

Logging Camps and Life in the 1930s

With the timber boom underway, logging camps sprang up deep in the woods around Bly. The Pelican Bay Lumber Company set up what became one of the largest logging camps in all of southern Oregon at Robinson Springs, about 11-12 miles southeast of Bly. By September 1929, Pelican Bay Camp on Fishhole had nearly 200 men employed, plus many of their wives and children living on site. The company erected rows of wooden bunkhouses and cookhouse tents in a natural alpine meadow fed by clear springs. New cabins were continuously being built to house workers' families, and even a one-room schoolhouse was established at the camp for about 20 children. For a once-isolated area, it was astounding. Each day, loggers felled the huge ponderosa pines with crosscut saws and hauled them by company railroad to Bly, where they were transferred to the OC&E trains bound for the company's main sawmill on Klamath Lake. At camp, horses and cats (caterpillar tractors) skidded logs to the rail landings, and steam donkeys and jammers (crane loaders) lifted the logs onto rail cars. Despite the rugged work, Pelican's camp provided decent living conditions for the era - good spring water, hot meals in a big cookhouse, and even recreation.

To the northeast of Bly, the Ewauna Box Company maintained its own remote logging camp at Quartz Mountain. There, a tank steam engine (a saddle-tank locomotive) chuffed up and down steep grades hauling pine logs back toward Bly. Photographs from winter 1930 show the Ewauna camp's cook house on Quartz Mountain, perched amid deep snow, serving hearty food to a hardy logging crew. Ewauna's operation was noted for its well-built logging railroad - 18 miles of track with Heisler and rod locomotives in use. A post office was even established at Quartz Mountain in 1930 to serve the camp community. By the late 1930s, Ewauna's timber up on Quartz Mountain was largely cut over. In 1940, as operations wound down, the company moved the bachelor bunkhouses from Quartz Mountain to another location, signaling the end of that camp's era.

Back in the town of Bly, the logging boom drove a period of rapid growth. Hundreds of workers and their families moved into the area seeking jobs. In 1929, Bly's population was only around 300, but it swelled as logging took off. In response, local entrepreneurs built new amenities: a fine new depot greeted arriving trains, and boarding houses, stores, and even a theater sprang up in Bly to serve the influx of loggers. Bly gained a reputation as a rowdy timber town - it even boasted a tavern called the Logger's Club and, at a nearby mill camp called Ivory Pine, there was reportedly a house of ill repute alongside the dance hall to entertain lumberjacks on payday.

Sawmills in Bly: From Crane's Mill to Podunk

Interestingly, during the initial boom, most logs were shipped out of Bly raw, to be milled at large factories in Klamath Falls (Pelican Bay Lumber's mill at Pelican City, and Ewauna's box factory). But soon Bly got its own sawmills, which anchored the town's economy for the next half-century. The first major mill was established by H. R. Crane. In spring 1931, Harold Crane brought in an electrically driven, portable band sawmill and set it up just north of town on the Garrett ranch property. By May 1931, Crane's crew had excavated a mill pond and erected the new mill, which boasted a capacity of 30-40 thousand board feet per day. On June 14, 1931, Crane Mills, Inc. sawed its first log in Bly, marking the town's transition into a true mill town. Initially, Crane's portable band mill employed about 25-40 men and cut roughly 20,000 board feet per day, but it could scale up production as needed. The impact on Bly was immediate - the industry had already left its mark on the town, having added about 12 new families with more coming.

Crane also set up a secondary mill on the North Fork of Sprague River, a few miles from Bly, to cut timber from that area. This smaller North Fork mill was sold to the Ivory Pine Company in 1936. Crane's main Bly mill operated through the Depression years, albeit with some shutdowns in 1932 when lumber inventories piled up. By 1933, Crane's mill and logging camp were operating steadily despite the hard times.

Meanwhile, another big player arrived: the Ivory Pine Lumber Company. Ivory Pine started in 1933 when entrepreneur E. P. Ivory took over an idle mill near Klamath Falls. In 1936, Ivory Pine moved its operations to Bly by purchasing Crane's North Fork mill and timber rights in that vicinity. Ivory Pine set up a sawmill camp about 10 miles northwest of Bly, along the North Fork Sprague River - a place the locals nicknamed Podunk. The Ivory Pine mill became a major operation. It ran two shifts and by the late 1930s was cutting around 12 million board-feet of lumber per year, chiefly ponderosa pine. At its peak, around 150 men worked for Ivory Pine, and a full company town sprouted around the mill site - complete with bunkhouses, family houses, a cookhouse, and even electricity by 1940. Podunk had a reputation as a pretty wild community - it even had a row of houses of prostitution and a dance hall for after-hours entertainment. Children from the Ivory Pine camp were bused into Bly's school, bouncing over muddy roads - indeed, spring mud could get so bad that the school bus sometimes couldn't reach the camp. Nonetheless, Ivory Pine camp life had its comforts: the cookhouse meals were hearty and a bull cook even did chores like making beds for the loggers. In the evenings, workers relaxed by listening to radio, and in later years one camp even boasted a television set in the rec hall.

Ivory Pine thrived during the late 1930s and early WWII years. The mill filled large orders for national defense - everything from lumber for military housing to boxes for munitions. However, by the late 1940s the accessible timber was depleted. In 1948, Ivory Pine Lumber Co. shut down its Bly-area mill and Podunk was dismantled, bringing an end to that colorful chapter. Many of the portable buildings and machinery were hauled off to a new venture in Danuba, California, and the forest slowly reclaimed the old mill site.

Weyerhaeuser's East Side Expansion (Late 1930s-1940s)

As smaller companies like Pelican Bay and Ewauna were logging out their tracts, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company was steadily increasing its footprint around Bly. Weyerhaeuser had actually been involved behind the scenes since 1929 - that year it partnered with the Oregon Land & Livestock Co. to form the Bly Timber Company, a joint venture that pooled timberlands and contracted sales of logs to Ewauna Box Co. This arrangement gave Weyerhaeuser a stake in the Bly area harvest early on. But the company's biggest move came at the end of the 1930s.

By 1939-1940, Weyerhaeuser began constructing its own private logging railroad network into the vast pine forests north of Bly - the so-called East Block of its Klamath timber holdings. While most outfits were turning to trucks by the 1940s, Weyerhaeuser still invested in a heavy-duty logging railroad to tap remote stands in western Lake County. They extended a branch from the OC&E at Sycan (near Beatty) and pushed 45 miles north into the woods, eventually reaching a terminus known as Camp 500. Along this Weyerhaeuser Woods Line, camps sprung up with simple names like Camp 6, Camp 9, Camp 14, etc., corresponding to rail stations or mileposts. Camp 6 was about 16 miles from Bly, Camp 9 about 50 miles out in the deep timber. In these camps, Weyerhaeuser loggers lived in bunkhouses (usually four men to a cabin) and worked in the woods year-round, even through snowy winters. Life at the Weyerhaeuser camps was famously well-organized: the company provided big cookhouses with professional cooks and bakers, and meals served family style at long tables. A bull cook would tidy up the bunkhouses and even make the loggers' beds daily, so the men returned from 10 hours of felling trees to clean quarters and hot food. These camps were isolated enclaves of civilization in the forest.

During World War II, demand for timber soared, and Weyerhaeuser's Klamath Falls mill (opened in 1929) ran at full tilt, producing lumber for barracks, crating, and other war uses. Many men went off to war, so for the first time Weyerhaeuser hired women to work in the mills and planing sheds in Klamath Falls. In Bly's logging camps, operations continued with older men and those exempt from service, supplying logs to feed that wartime production. The Fremont National Forest sold record volumes of timber during the early 1940s, fueling the war effort. This intense harvesting on both private and federal lands around Bly could not be sustained indefinitely, however. By the late 1940s, some of the big pine stands near Bly had been cut over and the initial logging boom subsided. Pelican Bay Lumber Company ceased its Bly-area logging by 1934, and Ewauna's branch line was done by the early 1940s. Weyerhaeuser's logging railroad would keep running for a few more decades, but even they would eventually transition to modern methods.

Post-War Changes: Mill Consolidation and Community Impacts (1950s-1960s)

After WWII, Bly's logging industry went through consolidation and modernization. Smaller family-owned mills were absorbed or replaced by larger operations. Harold Crane's pioneer sawmill, for example, was sold in 1946 to the Spangler Lumber Company, marking the end of the Crane era. The new owners took over Crane's mill and timber holdings, planning to continue operations as long as timber lasted. Under Spangler's tenure, the mill was upgraded to a six-foot single band headrig and a planer, and Bly's logging economy chugged along through the late 1940s.

Disaster struck in 1954 when a fire destroyed the Spangler mill in Bly. Within nine months, the community rebounded - local businessmen Don McGee and Gilbert Lilly rebuilt the facility and reopened it in mid-1955 as the Bly Lumber Company. The reopening was a big event, with some 250 people attending the ceremony, and initially the mill ran with one shift of 18 workers. By that summer of 1955, Bly Lumber Co. was already adding a second shift to increase output. The mill supplied lumber under contract to Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., hinting at the close ties between the small outfit and the timber giant. Bly Lumber Company also aggressively bid on U.S. Forest Service timber sales in the Fremont National Forest. This reflected a growing emphasis on sustainable forestry practices in that era, with companies replanting and the Forest Service managing for long-term yields.

Bly's mill suffered another devastating fire in March 1958, but again it was rebuilt - this time as an even larger, all-steel facility dedicated in June 1958. Through the late 1950s, the Bly Lumber Company was the main employer in town, cutting its own logs and running day and night shifts. In 1959, the McGees leased the mill to the E. H. and A. H. Loveness Timber Company. Under Loveness, logs were harvested around Bly but often trucked to the company's planing mill in the Willamette Valley for finishing. This foreshadowed a trend of raw logs and unfinished lumber being shipped out of the area for further processing, as larger companies centralized their operations.

Throughout these changes, Bly remained a robust logging community. The 1950s and 1960s saw relative prosperity - logs were plentiful, and the mills ran steadily to feed America's post-war housing boom. Logging techniques were gradually shifting: trucks began to haul more logs to the mill instead of railroad spur lines, especially for shorter distances. Many loggers still recall the 1960s as a kind of golden age - high production, good pay, and a tight-knit community. They also recall the occasional dangers and rough edges of a timber town.

The Weyerhaeuser Era and Modern Logging (1970s-1980s)

In 1970, Weyerhaeuser Company bought the Bly sawmill outright, heralding a new era of corporate ownership. The giant timber firm folded the operation into its empire as the Bly Division. Weyerhaeuser immediately invested in modernizing the mill - notably building a new stud mill in 1973 to process the smaller-diameter logs that were then being harvested in second-growth stands. This new mill allowed more efficient production of 2x4 studs for construction, and it also signaled a shift in logger lifestyle: once the new mill opened, Weyerhaeuser shut down its old remote logging camps. By 1973, it was deemed more cost-effective to have loggers live in Bly or commute daily, rather than maintain the extensive camp infrastructure in the woods. The era of Camp 6, Camp 9, etc., came to an end - crews now rode to work in crew buses (fondly called crummies) each morning or drove logging trucks into the cutting areas and returned to town by evening. Thus, after nearly four decades, Bly's surrounding forests fell silent at night without the glow of camp lights - the loggers were back home in Bly with their families.

Under Weyerhaeuser's ownership, the Bly operation reached peak production. In 1975, Weyerhaeuser purchased the entire OC&E Railroad from Southern Pacific and Great Northern, gaining full control of the transportation link from Bly to Klamath Falls. They ran long log trains and also shipped finished lumber and wood chips out from the Bly mill to market. By the late 1970s, the OC&E was carrying 35,000 carloads per year, an all-time high, including about 4,000 carloads of lumber and chips from Bly annually. The mill itself was upgraded with modern equipment, and Weyerhaeuser employed dozens of workers in two shifts. These were the high-output years.

Yet, change was on the horizon. The early 1980s brought a downturn - high interest rates slowed construction, federal timber sales became more restricted due to environmental laws, and the richest timber stands around Bly had been largely harvested. Car loadings on the OC&E fell to less than half the peak by the mid-1980s. Weyerhaeuser began to scale back. In 1984, the Bly sawmill was permanently shut down, ending over half a century of milling in the town. Many jobs were lost, and Bly's population dwindled from nearly 500 in 1980 to under 300 in the ensuing years as families moved away. For a few more years, Weyerhaeuser kept logging some remaining tracts and hauled raw logs on the OC&E, but even that could not last. By 1990, the local forests were essentially logged out, and Weyerhaeuser ceased all operations on May 1, 1990, closing the book on Bly's logging era. The company pulled out, selling off timberlands or transferring them to the U.S. Forest Service in land exchanges. The same year, the venerable OC&E railroad saw its last train, and the tracks were soon ripped up.

Legacy and Reflection

Today, Bly is a quieter place, surrounded by second-growth pine forests and memories of its logging heyday. In the 1990s, the old rail grade that once carried trainloads of logs was converted into the OC&E Woods Line State Trail, a 100-mile rail-trail for hikers and cyclists that stands as Oregon's longest linear park. Interpretive signs along the trail near Bly remind visitors of the gigantic log trains and the camps named by numbers. Locals and historians have worked to preserve this heritage, ensuring that future generations know how this small town helped power a region's timber economy for decades.

From the earliest sawmill pioneers to the might of Weyerhaeuser, Bly's logging history is rich and multilayered. It is a story of boom and bust, of technological change (steam trains to diesel trucks), of human grit and community, and of the forest itself, enduring and renewing. The town that once proclaimed itself in the heart of the timber country now stands as a quiet monument to Oregon's lumber heritage, with the voice of the past still whispering through the tall pines.

As lifelong resident Quentin Nichols wrote this section out, these are some thoughts that came to mind: What Working Through This History Has Brought Up.