Henry Olson
December 5, 1994As told to Loretta Slepikas
I was with the Northern Pacific Railroad nine years before moving to Prineville in 1947. My wife and I grew up in Sandpoint,Idaho. After her relatives had all moved away from Sandpoint she was lonely. We finally decided to pack up and leave, too. We came to Prineville because my sister lived here. The day after I got here my brother-in-law got me a job with Alexander-Yawkey pulling slick chain and feeding the big planer.
After a year at Alexander-Yawkey working 40-hour shifts,I made the switch to Hudspeths. They were working all kinds of hours and I needed a lot of overtime. At Hudspeths I was more or less a jack-of-all-trades until the head scaler left for Arkansas. I was helping him put in a cold deck of logs while the dry kilns were being built in 1948. When I found out he was leaving, I asked for his job. Fred Hudspeth hired me and I scaled logs at Hudspeths for 32 years.
John and Floreine Hudspeth
Opening Day, Hudspeth Mill, 1947
John Hudspeth was the primary motivator of the company. He liked to use other people's money. He was always getting backing from someone, mostly from back East. You hardly ever saw John. He'd drop by once in a while but usually he was promoting and travelling all over the country getting financing and stuff that was needed to keep the sawmill going. Fred was in the office. Claude got out early.
Scaling the logs was hard work. I had to climb on and off the log trucks to do my scaling. The scaler out in the woods, or bullbuck as he was called, scaled for the timber fallers. I scaled, (measured) the logs as they came in to the mill pond. The contract loggers were paid on my scale. The logs then went into the pond and the deck man scaled again for the office. The Forest Service had their own scalers. I scaled and unloaded trucks all by myself but once my appendix ruptured. When I got back to work there were three men doing what I had been doing alone. They realized then that I was doing more than they thought I was doing.
My starting salary was $1.00 or $1.20 an hour but we worked a lot of overtime. Hudspeths had a fleet of 30 trucks all painted a robin-egg blue with white fenders and trim. John Hudspeth was gung ho on robin-egg blue. One fall when we started cold-decking; that is, storing logs for the spring break-up when it would not be possible to get into the woods, they put on extra gypos and we had to work Sundays. My check showed 102 hours one week and 105 hours the next.
The trucks were coming in so fast I didn't even have time to eat my sandwiches. I even gave my lunch away once because I knew I wouldn't have time to eat. I guess I kept going by drinking milk. I always kept milk in the pop machine and I drank so much of it, it closed up my veins. I ended up with open heart surgery in 1977.
I scaled more logs than any scaler is supposed to. My biggest day was a little over 500,000 board feet. The Forest Service claimed that 100,000 feet is an eight-hour day. So I was putting in five eight-hour days in about 16 or 17 hours. You see, I came up during the tough Depression years and I knew what it was. I felt a responsibility to take care of my family and let the wife stay home and raise the children. Which she did.
I remember the biggest log I ever scaled. It was a 16' log that scaled over 2300 feet. Its diameter was taller than I. The mill couldn't cut it. I had to cut slabs off with a chain saw before it could go through the sawmill. Once a one-log truckload came in. Two 16' logs out of it scaled a little over 5000 feet. It was 5-1/2 or 6 feet in diameter on the small end.
The mill was putting out between 35 and 40 million board feet a year.
At one time during the late 60's and early 70's after purchasing the Blue Mountain mill at John Day and with the Bridge Creek mill and other mills, Hudspeth Sawmill was one of the largest Ponderosa Pine shippers in the United States. At one time they had acres and acres of private timber. They had pretty near all of Waterman Flat in Wheeler County in the Mitchell area. When they bought the John Day mill, they got Rudio Mountain which was all private timber.
There was really no reason why they shouldn't have been one of the last mills to go. John got interested in buying cattle ranches. He seemed more interested in ranching than in lumbering. By purchasing all of those cattle ranches they just got over-extended. And with the recession of 1980 they couldn't meet their obligations and folded up.
Hudspeths put more money in Crook County than any outfit I know. At one time they had the biggest payroll in Crook County. Their men worked all kinds of hours and they pumped an awful lot of money into Crook County. It should be noted that Floreine Hudspeth, John's wife, was the prime motivator in building the Church of Christ, with Hudspeth money.
When Hudspeths built their brand new mill in Prineville, Floreine came out and broke a bottle of champagne on a log as it came up to the slip. Then she crawled up on the carriage; the carriage that moved back and forth where the logs were sawed into boards. The shotgun was steam and steam is tricky. The poor sawyer told me afterwards that he was sweating blood. He had to cut the first log with Floreine riding the carriage. The machinery had not yet been checked out and they didn't even know if it would function properly.
The new mill burned to the ground but John immediately rebuilt. The millwright had been doing some welding. After he left, the sparks took off. It was on a Sunday; my family and I were out of town. When we came home looking down off viewpoint I could see the mill was gone. All there was was smoke. I didn't know whether I had a job or not but I was able to keep working because they kept right on logging and sold the logs.
I retired at 62 after surgery. The long hours finally caught up with me and as I said I wound up with open heart surgery. Hudspeth's sawmill shut down in 1981 which was a severe blow to the employees and to the town.