Virgil Ammons

December 4, 1995
As told to Martin Morisette

I was born May 18, 1917 at the Held Ranch on Bear Creek in Crook County, just over the mountain from Post. My Dad, Alex Ammons, came to Prineville from North Carolina April 1, 1900. He didn't feel too well back there so he decided to come out here. Two of his sisters were already here.

The first thing Dad did after he got to Prineville he went to work for Hawkins Brothers who had a mill on Duncan Creek. He skidded logs with bulls for a while. He worked there about a year. The Hawkins mill had been in operation since the first part of the century.

My mother was Nora Birdsong. She and my Dad were married in 1904. There were a lot of Birdsongs around here at that time. Some time after they were married Dad and Grandpa Birdsong, Henry Birdsong, Dad's father-in-law, bought a mill up on Wolf Creek out of Paulina. They moved the mill from there over to Wiley Flat on Maury Mountain. They ran it there for a little while then Dad bought my grandfather out and moved the mill over on Indian Creek. Indian Creek is about in the middle of the Maury Mountains on the south side, right off of Antelope Flat. Dad owned property on Antelope Flat for years.

The mill was called Alex Ammons Sawmill. I never heard it called anything else. My Dad bought timber from the government. That was long before the forest service came to Central Oregon. There was no competition at all. There weren't enough mills to even have competition.

Since I didn't come along until 1917 I don't remember all the things I was told, but I think they just petitioned the government for X number of board feet of logs or timber, and the government sold it to them for X number of dollars. I don't know for sure but I believe that's the way it was.

There were eight or ten people working at Dad's circle mill. There was a house on the place where my Dad and Mother lived. There was a dry deck and the lumber was all air dried. There was a planer. I don't know what year it was but Dad ordered a planer and had it shipped into The Dalles. He went down and freighted it out with horses.

Dad sold out to Cliff Todd and a man by the name of Hamlin. Hamlin was Cliff Todd's brother-in-law. It was in 1915 or '16 that Dad sold out to Todd and Hamlin. I don't know Hamlin's first name--Hamlin was all I ever heard. He was killed by lightning when a thunderstorm hit while he was plowing ground out at the old Cook Ranch south of Millican. It killed him and three horses.

I believe the reason Dad sold is that the lumber market at that time was kind of getting to a stalemate. I don't believe Cliff Todd ran the mill too much after he bought it. Well, he ran it quite a bit, but not near like Dad had before him. When Cliff Todd sold the mill it went to Sisters but I don't know who bought it.

At the time Dad was running the mill is when all of those homesteaders were hitting that Bend-Burns desert. And he was selling directly to the homesteaders. By the time he sold out he had about $11,000 scattered out there in money that he was owed but never was able to collect. That might have had something to do with his selling the mill.

I heard Dad tell about skiddin' with bulls and horses. For a long time they used bulls but they did skid some with horses. They had a loggin' wagon and I believe Dad let that go with the mill when Todd bought it. The bunks on the wagon came up above the wheels. You could roll the logs up and haul them in and roll them off. Everybody just came up there and got what lumber they wanted. Dad never delivered anything. Folks just came up there and loaded up and took off. Dad sold out, you see, before I was born. I was born in 1917 and he sold the mill in '15 or '16. So what I'm saying here is what I heard Dad talk about.

After Dad sold the mill he bought a ranch from his brother-in-law, Paul Held, the fellow that the Held school was named after. At Held school is where I got my education. In 1916 he bought 1080 acres from Uncle Paul Held. He had that place until I was eight years old. His sister and brother-in-law foreclosed and forced Dad out. He only owed $800 on it but they wouldn't let him sell anything to pay it off. Dad also had a homestead down on Camp Creek. He also owned 680 acres on Antelope Flat. He had about 300 head of cattle. He had one or two hired hands helping him.

My mother died in 1919 when I was two years old. There were seven of us kids. One of my sisters passed away early on when they were still living up at the mill. Dad had the place on Camp Creek where he brought his horses and bulls and everything. The girls, my oldest sisters, could go to school at the Barnes school house on Camp Creek. In the spring when it dried up enough that they could get up there and people could start haulin' lumber they'd move back up to the mill.

In the 1940's Bill Endicott and I had a sawmill up on Snow Mountain. Bill was owner of Endicott Logging. Our mill was Endicott and Ammons Lumber Company. We bought timber off the Mills Land & Livestock property on the edge of Snow Mountain. In the fall of '46 we built a sawmill between Doe Springs and Norcros. We ran the mill until it burned out in '47. We were getting ready to move the mill down on Silver Creek, out towards Burns. In fact, we hauled our lumber to Burns. We had six people working in the mill and ran about 32,000' a day. It was a circle. We gypoed out the logging but had our own trucks for hauling lumber.

We were all ready to move when the mill burned. We already had a pond dug on Dairy Creek and everything ready to go that winter to move down on Silver Creek which runs right by Dairy Creek. We planned to cut the timber to build this other mill but it burned before we even got the timber cut. That was the end of our first sawmill.

We went ahead and built the second mill the winter of '47 and '48 and started running in '48. In '49 the market came back from a seller's market to a buyer's market. We had a sharp lumber buyer who took us for a whole bunch of money and we went under. We finally got it pulled back around to where we got pretty near everything paid for by the time it was all over but it was a lot of work for nothing.

This second mill located on Dairy Creek could be reached by going towards Bend from Burns near the Riley store you turn and go up Silver Creek over the hill and into the upper Silver Creek valley. That's where our mill was. It was still a circle mill, top and bottom, and we still had about six people working for us but we were cutting more lumber. We were cutting 40,000 to 42,000 in that mill.

Bill Endicott had a little more invested in it than I did. I finally wanted out. I told Bill that he could have my part of it and asked him to sell it. He turned me loose and I went to work. He eventually sold the mill. It went to the John Day area and was put in operation there.

(Note: In September, 1949, Virgil's wife, Ida Mae, died. The couple had two daughters age eight and four. Virgil was in debt to the tune of $38,000 from the sawmill operation. Part of this debt was caused by the lumber broker, Carl Soderburg, who wasn't exactly honest in the transactions in which he was involved with at the sawmill. Virgil tells how he got out of this situation.)

I was too chicken-hearted to make my girls mind. The oldest one was supposed to be going to school at Silver Creek but I just didn't have it in me to make her go. The other girl was four. I had a brother and sister living in Burns and whenever I went into town to load out lumber or ship it out in cars she wouldn't stay with either of them.

We were in Prineville when the girls' mother passed away. She had polio and we had to fly her to an isolation hospital in Portland. I left the younger daughter with Madge and Fred Endicott, my sister and brother-in-law. Her mother never came home. And from then on I couldn't get away from her. I finally had to do something so I brought the girls over to Redmond to another sister in order to get away from them so somebody else could do something with them. I just didn't have it. The oldest daughter was eight and the younger one was four. It was a pretty rough road.

I was deep in debt from the sawmill. I had some lumber stored at a lumber yard in Burns. I had been talking with Al from Hines Lumber Company about this lumber. About a week later he sent one of his loggers over to tell me he wanted to talk to me. I went into his office and we made a deal.

It was right in the middle of the winter and they were having a hard time getting enough dry stuff and dry shavings to get heat to run the dry kiln. He wanted me to put my lumber through his mill. He would charge me $1.00 a thousand to put it through the kiln--just enough to set the pitch--and then he would resaw it, plane it, and sell it for me.

Well that pleased me no end. What he wanted was those dry shavings that he'd get from processing my lumber so as to make heat in his dry kiln. It worked out real good. I finally got rid of all that lumber and by the time I was through I was down to about $8000 of debt. Then I went to work.

When I got cut free from the sawmill in '49 I went out and gypo logged a little. I was pretty well equipped to get a job pretty near any place I wanted to go. Because before I went into the mill I worked for Endicott Logging. I could have gone to work for Hudspeth or Ochoco Lumber Company running 'dozer. Or I could have gone to Alexander-Yawkey, later Alexander-Stewart. I could have gotten a job anywhere running a 'dozer. Even for Paul Kelley. All I would have had to do was to go over there with lunch pail in hand and I could have gone to work. I was the first guy in this area loggin' that hit the $1.00 an hour mark.

Endicott Logging got started with old Pop Forsythe in about 1936. Pop Forsythe was part owner of Pine Products at that time. When I first went to work for Endicott I was settin' chokers and I was paid by the thousand. It was a gypo deal. I was getting seven cents a thousand. We were putting out about 100 to 110,000 feet a day, so I was making $7.00 to $70.00 a day. The guys working by the hour were getting 50 cents an hour.

I felled timber some but I was usually on building roads and skiddin' logs. I started my road building career in the Ochocos with Endicott on a 'dozer. I was doing all of the road building. During the war I was logging boss for Endicott. Through the war years I didn't even have to take a physical or anything else. I was exempt all the way through the war because I was logging superintendent. At that time, I was the youngest logging superintendent on the west coast. I quit the bossin' job in '46 when Bill and I went over on Snow Mountain and built the mill.

Anyway after I got out of the mill a fellow by the name of Dennis Bunkey was logging for Wolverine Western Sawmill in Burns. He was having trouble finding crews. I gypoed the loading part and furnished two hookers and a knot bumper. I ran the shovel. I loaded for so much a thousand. I did pretty good. I did good enough that he wouldn't let me have it the next year, he took it back.

After that I wound up falling timber with a cross-cut at Shevlin-Hixon's logging camp in LaPine for a short while. I worked as a mechanic and welder in Brooks-Scanlon's Cat Shop for three or four years. And one winter I worked at Gilchrist pulling lumber on the green chain. In December of '51 I got married again. Joyce and I were married in Burns, Oregon. She had three kids of her own--two boys and a girl. We bunched them together, hers and mine. We raised the five kids and twelve years after we were married we had one of our own, so we raised six kids.

Eventually I got into construction. I was a heavy equipment operator. I went into Union Local 701 Operating Engineers. They sent you wherever someone was needed. I kept following the better jobs. I worked on the Crooked River Dam (Bowman Dam) all the way through. I worked all the way through on the Round Butte Dam. I got sent to Baker on the Mason Dam and worked there all through that job. Those were good jobs because they weren't just a month or two on a piece of road and then you're done. Then you had to put your name in the hall and hire out again and if there was another job you'd have to wait until your name came up on the list.

I retired at the age of 68. I had just run heavy equipment as far as I could go and I told my wife I was not going to run it any more and that I'm through and so I quit at the age of 68.

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