Midwestern Company Established Large Mill near Burns, Oregon

Large lumber mills in the mid-west became interested in the vast pine forests of eastern Oregon in the mid-1920s. The Malheur National Forest began advertising 800 million board feet of Ponderosa pine for sale in 1922. In 1923 Fred Herrick won the sale with a bid of $2.80 per thousand board feet. As part of the contract, he had to construct a sawmill and a thirty-mile railroad extension from Crane to Burns. He also had to build a fifty-mile common carrier railroad from Burns north into the mountains to access the pine timber near Seneca.

The Herrick Lumber Company completed the Malheur Railroad track to Burns on Sept. 24, 1924. However soaring prices for real state made it difficult to find an economical site for building a mill. National economic conditions led Harrick to not be able to fulfill the terms of the contract. The sale was re-advertised, and Edward Hines Lumber Company based in Chicago was the successful bidder. In 1928, the company purchased Herrick’s interests in the incomplete railroad and the mill.

One of the goals of the Forest Service was to improve rail connections between national lumber markets and the Blue Mountain forests of eastern Oregon. After winning the timber contract, the Hines Company built the 52-mile Oregon and Northwestern Railroad between Burns and Seneca. The mill site was located about two miles southwest of Burns. The company determined that it needed housing for mill employees and had developers design a new town and construct over 150 homes.

The first log was cut in the new mill on January 27, 1930, but the company struggled during the Great Depression and growth was slow. With the outbreak of World War II, the mill began supplying lumber products for the war effort. After the war, the company focused on the home market and modernized the plant in the early 1950s.

By 1963 the company was producing 134,250,000 board feet of lumber from the Hines plant, and payroll had reached an all-time high. Timber was harvested from the original timber sale until 1968. In the 1970s, the company modernized the operation, but problems developed in the late 1970s with rising timber prices, high wages, and a deteriorating lumber market. Competitive bidding resulted in the decline of the lumber company. In 1980 the company began reducing its production and laying off workers. The mill was again re-modernized but on a much smaller scale. In 1983, the Edward Hines Lumber Company sold the last of its Oregon holdings to Snow Mountain Pine Company, thus ending an era that spanned over fifty years. Mill operations in Hines have since ceased and the railroad tracks were removed. Many of the historic buildings have been dismantled or converted to other uses