Carl Peterson
September 26, 1994As told to Loretta Slepikas
(Note: Carl Peterson had an idea and it worked. From studying forestry to logging engineering to wood products, he had learned a lot about wood and wood species and found the subject fascinating. He came to Prineville to look for a place to work and came up with the idea of using edgings, or sawmill waste, for mouldings. From that early start, Clear Pine Mouldings was born.)
Here is his story:
My mother had immigrated from Sweden. My father came from Minnesota and homesteaded at Christmas Lake. While working at the Portland shipyards during World War I, he and my mother met and married. I was born in December of 1917.
I majored in forestry at Oregon State. Maybe it was because I liked the mountains and spent a lot of time hiking and camping in the woods. I held odd jobs around sawmills and plywood plants. worked at logging, worked on the docks in Portland, and worked as a lookout on Dry Mountain one summer. I didn't really like working for the Forest Service, so I went into logging engineering. After working in a plywood plant for a while I found I liked the wood products much better than anything else so I finally finished in wood products.
I'd been a company commander in the service during WWII and I wanted to have my own business. It took me a long time to find what I wanted. I stumbled onto Ponderosa Pine by reading articles in the forest products labs and found them interesting. In 1948 I came to Prineville to look around for a place to work with wood on weekends or on days off.
I presented my idea to Stuart Shelk of Ochoco Lumber Company; the idea of salvaging what was a waste material to them and use it to make picture frame mouldings and window and door mouldings. I wanted to use the edgings, the material that comes off of a board when it is squared up to make lumber. Those edgings might have one to two inches of good wood the whole length of the piece. I thought I could salvage that material and make mouldings.
I didn't know Stuart before I went in to talk to him. I had never met him and had no connection with him or the mill. But he agreed to let me go ahead and give it a try. There was no investment on his part and the agreement was that I would pay him a certain amount on whatever I was able to salvage.
I worked right along with Ochoco's men at the end of the green chain. The trim sawyer would allow the good pieces to go down the chain and fall over the chain into a pile. In the morning I'd come in and get a big pile of edgings and clean the bark off of the pieces.
I had designed a little ripsaw with which I could clean off the bark. I ripped off the bark and sorted the pieces out in piles according to width and length. I would have 1/2", 1", and 1-1/2" pieces of wood 10 feet long and longer. Pieces up to 10 feet in length were placed in one pile and anything over 10 feet was put in another pile. I stacked the pieces on stickers with about 3/4" of air between each row of material and let the edgings air dry three to four weeks. When the moisture content was down to 8-10 percent I could mould the piece and have a product that was saleable.
I worked my business basically from Ochoco's mill for two years. I had saved some money over the years and my parents helped me out with a small loan. I developed a small market for my product.
One of my customers in Portland whose business was not doing too well brought a machine moulder to Prineville for me to use and we formed a partnership. I bought a little piece of property where we set up the moulder. I met Leo Donnelly of Contact Lumber Company in Portland and started selling the finished product through his company. We were selling him a boxcar every two or three months.
It was still a very small business when Mr.Donnelly wanted to buy more of our products. Several times he talked about increasing the scope of my business by buying Shop lumber and cutting it up for window and door parts. I was interested, of course, but I knew very little about this side of the industry. I did some investigating to decide whether we should expand into this. And this brings me to the subject of the "river" mills, so named because they were all situated along the Mississippi River.
The predominant wood being used through the middle west, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, was eastern White Pine and it was being cut out. It was a fabulous wood. It had so many of the properties of Cedar as well as Pine; in other words, it machined beautifully. You could drive a nail on the very edge of the board and it wouldn't split. Houses in the area of Massachusetts that were built in the 1600's are still standing. It was probably the most important lumber specie in North America at that time.
This timber was depleted at the site of many of the "river" mills. In the early days of logging the logs were rafted down the river to these various sawmills. When the timber was cut out and there were no more logs, the sawmills converted to what is commonly called millwork plants. Millwork is windows, doors, cabinets, drainboards and that sort of thing. Those mills finally ran out of eastern White Pine and looked to using our western Pine.
The western Pine was far from satisfactory because it couldn't take the elements of weather. The wood would rot. But at about the beginning of World War II, Penta Chlorophenol was developed. By dipping the western Pine in Penta, it made it unpalatable for bacteria or whatever it is that destroys wood and it was just as good as the old eastern White Pine. So, the river mills started buying western Pine, also known as Ponderosa Pine, from eastern Oregon, eastern Washington and Idaho for their millwork plants. We mixed Penta with a very fine thinner and we put in wax. The wax would keep moisture from getting into the end of the wood and then through freezing and thawing opening up the wood which would cause it to deteriorate.
In those days freight rates were low, like $10.00 to $11.00 a thousand board foot. By the time I got started in the business freight was more like $30.00 to $40.00 a thousand board foot. And so as freight rates began to increase, the cost to the millwork plants went higher and higher. Even with milling in transit rates the lumber was costing them 50 percent more after one-third of it was lost in milling. So the millwork people in the old river mills started buying our western Pine pre-cut to their specifications.
There were a few plants out here trying to get into pre-cutting the lumber before shipping it to the river mills who had all the savvy for making doors and windows. And this is what Mr. Donnelly wanted us to do.
Given that history, we decided to go for it. We would manufacture cut stock for the river mills and use the higher grades for door frames and moulding sets. The short lengths would be finger-jointed (pieced). So we worked out a deal with Mr. Donnelly and in 1955 Clear Pine Mouldings was established. Once people like Andersen Corporation found out they could save money by buying pre-cut material and they were satisfied with our cut stock they wanted more and more of our lumber.
I came into it at just the right time. I started in 1948 and quit in 1978. The Donnellys had come in from Contact Lumber Company to enlarge it, to get it up to a big plant and in 1978 the Donnellys bought me out.
The old pinus astrogus, eastern White Pine, had durability under weather conditions. It could be used for siding and windows and it would last against moisture and rot. The Douglas Fir that grows here is very, very strong. It is a good wood where strength is needed and is used in framing houses. The clear wood out of Dougls Fir is used in flooring and many other things. It is difficult to work with because it splits easily and it is necessary to drill the nailholes. Hemlock has many of those same characteristics. Spruce is a great deal like Pine except there is no character to the wood. It can be used in sounding boards, such as pianos. The king of them all is Ponderosa Pine which has been pretty well cut out.
We can't criticize what has been done in the past. There were thousands of acres of timberland just sitting there waiting to be cut. We'll have to come up with something not as good as wood but good enough for those who don't know better; who don't know what we had before.
I first came to Central Oregon in 1938 to work as a lookout for the Forest Service. There was only the cattle industry and farming. Ochoco Lumber Company started cutting their first logs that year. Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon, of course, were in Bend. It was a wonderful open country and I loved it. I had never been east of the mountains. My parents were very frugal. They never bought anything unless they had the cash to pay for it, so when I found myself running out of food up on the lookout and wondering what to do, someone suggested I call the storekeeper in Paulina. He was 50 miles away and I was without a checkbook, but I called him from the lookout and told him about my dilemna. He filled my order, every last item. The first rancher going that way picked up the box of groceries and dropped it off for me.
I had grown up in Portland and here I was for a week, ten days, without seeing a soul. I had been farsighted enough to bring a couple hundred old Saturday Evening Posts and Collier's with me. I would read and watch the forest checking for fires. Me and other lookouts would chit chat on the phone or maybe we'd happen to go after water at the same time and have a game of Pinochle if there were no fire hazards at the time. Once my telephone was knocked out and I went down and found a tree had fallen over on it.
During the Depression years of the 1930's you didn't consider having a business of your own. Just finding a job was something. It took me over six years to get through college working when I could and going to school when I could.
Stuart Shelk put his trust in me and gave me the chance I needed. His superintendent, Tom Sickle, taught me about sawmilling and how to get the quality out of the wood. Bill Hartman, the shipping clerk, taught me how to handle lumber. The saw filer, the mechanics, everyone at the mill was most helpful.
I owe all of my success to those people who were at Ochoco Lumber Company in those early days.
(Note: After selling his interest in Clear Pine to the Donnellys of Contact Lumber Company, Peterson in 1960 established Bright Wood Corporation in Madras, Oregon. In 1978 he sold his interest in Bright Wood to the partnership which included Ken Stovall.)