John Snyder
April 11, 1995I came to Bend July 13th, 1925, finished high school and started working in mills in 1928. I've worked in small mills all around central Oregon and have worked the entire gamut, from hand set-works, and sawyers practically having to push the carriage through the saw, up to the present modern electric feeds and riderless carriages. Some of the mills were still using horses and high wheels then. In Sisters, horses were used to load the logs on trucks. There wasn't very much equipment. Two or three teams of horses and a couple of old Ford trucks kept the mill running.
Most of the small mills around the central Oregon area were just 'one-horse' mills. Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon in Bend were large and modern mills for that day. Shumway Brothers' mill on the Metolius River was a circle mill with a steam generated plant, and it was primitive. A tornado came through and laid down several million feet of prime timber below Camp Sherman. We worked there mostly for lumber and board and room. It was idle for a long time before it went bankrupt.
There wasn't much lumber taken out of the area. Most of the lumber that came out of those little mills stuck around and the timber was used locally. In Crook County, it wasn't until the City of Prineville Railway was established that lumber was shipped out of the area.
Bert Peterson's first mill in Sisters was a small band mill. As he developed and grew he got into a modern mill in Redmond which became Tite-Knot Pine Mill. I learned how to ride carriage and set ratchets at the various mills and from there I worked up to sawyer. By 1937 I had worked my way up to head-rig sawyer at Bert Peterson's mill in Sisters. I came to Hudspeth Pine and finally settled in at Ochoco Lumber Company in July of 1951. I sawed at Ochoco Lumber until my retirement in 1975.
When I came to Ochoco, a ratchet setter rode the carriage. He set the boards and ‘dogged’ the logs. The first major change came when they put in a debarker. With the bark off the logs the saws stayed sharper longer and the sawmill was a lot cleaner. Then we went to the riderless carriage where the sawyer operated the set works and the dogs by remote control. It took a while to learn but in a few months we were cutting more lumber with just one man and things just went smoother.
I was night sawyer for three years and I liked working the night shift. I went on days when an old Frenchman by the name of Ed Santere, who was day sawyer, committed suicide. I stayed on days until I my retirement.
My starting wage at Ochoco was $2.00 an hour. Negotiations were going on at the time I came there and before very long I was getting $2.40 an hour. When I left the wage was $7.00 and now it's about $13.00 or $14.00 for the same job. Charlie Coons was office manager, Ed Wilson was sales manager. Sawmill superintendent was Tom Sickle and shipping superintendent was Bill Hartman.
During the first worker's strike at Ochoco in 1952, I was able to build our house. During the second strike in 1954 we were down from June until the middle of September. I went to work sawing for Midstate Lumber Company at their mill in Paulina. They had mills in Spray and Pendleton and maybe some others, too. They also had a lumber yard in town.
Since my retirement I've never had an idle moment. For a while, I filled in for sawyers at some of the other mills. I've served on the Parks and Recreation Board; Elks Secretary; Bowman Museum Board of Directors; and Crook County Historical Society Treasurer.