Craig Woodward
January 25, 1995PART I
I've been able to trace my roots back to the Oregon Trail. My great great grandmother was a Ware. She came across the plains in 1852. Her father, Ware, was a casualty of the Trail but her mother and the children came on through.
My great great grandfather, Caleb Woodward, came across in 1853. They came to the Willamette Valley and moved to Central Oregon in the 1870's, settling near Mitchell. Five generations of my family are buried in a graveyard near Mitchell.
The family lineage goes from my great great grandfather, Caleb, to his son, Brick, then to his son, Otis, then to his son, Van, and to me, Van's son.
Except for my father, Van Woodward, all of the ancestors were homesteaders and lived off the land. My father was a logger. Prior to World War II he worked in the woods for the Hudspeth family and for other sawmill people in the Central Oregon area. After the war he moved to Roseburg where he was a trucker. He had a log truck and managed a bar and, in fact, built his own bar in Elkton, Oregon.
I was born in Roseburg December 14, 1946. The family moved back to Prineville when Dad bought the Casino Club here. I was still in grade school when we made the move. It was a thrill for all of us because we made frequent visits to Central Oregon and it was always a place we loved.
My family had been friends with the Hudspeth family. We were always in awe of that family. They seemed like the epitome of rags to riches people in those days. Shortly after moving back here Dad renewed old acquaintances with the Hudspeths and started doing salvage contract logging for them.
I was 15 when I started working in the woods with my father during the summer months. At Eastern Oregon College I had a hard time making ends meet pumping gas. So in my Junior year I started buying and selling timber as a means of putting myself through school. I've been in the timber business ever since. When I turned 21 I took on several large contracts. Once, my father and I went into partnership for a few years. He had the borrowing power for us to buy more equipment.
In college I had an opportunity to demonstrate a new rubber tired skidder for loggers. These skidders were just becoming popular up in the LaGrande area. In it's earlier day, it was like a farm tractor but with a cable and a winch on the back for skidding logs. The equipment dealer wanted us to demonstrate these machines for loggers in eastern Oregon. By now, I was buying and selling timber, but I didn't have the money to buy my own equipment, so having the use of these rubber tired skidders was a boon to my fledgling business. My brother and I and a couple of other fellows scheduled our classes so one or two of us could be working in the woods.
We were using the equipment for free but, looking back, the equipment dealer probably was using us. We were young and a bit reckless and we got handy enough operating this equipment. At first it was foreign and awkward but after a couple of weeks we could make it do things that it wouldn't do the first few days. The dealer continued to ask us if we wanted to keep the machine for another few days so he could bring out more loggers to watch how the machine worked.
Before I had my first sawmill I had a shake mill. It was a portable operation that we moved around the state trying to keep up with the wood supply. After that, I bought the Prineville Stud mill in Burns, Oregon from the Pine Products people--Jack Rhoden and John Crawford. I had been helping provide the logs for the mill when it came up for sale. They trusted me with a small down payment to try to make a go of a business that was floundering because of poor log supply. We operated the mill two years and then sold out to Longview Fibre Company at a substantial profit.
I have logged for or sold logs to Weyerhaeuser, DAW in Bend, Warmsprings Lumber Company, Consolidated Pine and Louisiana-Pacific; for Peacock Lumber, Pope & Talbot, Northern Pacific Railroad, Mountain Fir Lumber Co., Quant and Shrum. Also San Juan Lumber Co., Hudspeth Pine, Longview Fibre, Brooks-Scanlon, Edward Hines and others.
I was logging for Louisiana-Pacific when the opportunity to buy the sawmill came up. I had to raise $1 million for a down payment on the $2.9 million sawmill. I was able to borrow the down payment and had two years in which to pay back the loan. I paid it back in almost half that time. I purchased the sawmill in September of 1986 and established Prineville Sawmill Company. We operated the mill two years when the Crown Pacific people came in and wanted to buy the mill.
In October of 1988 Crown Pacific purchased my Prineville plant. It was an opportunity to sell at a profit. Although I had a twinge of regret over the decision to sell, it was the only prudent thing to do. I was operating on a shoestring. It turned out to be a wise business decision. A short time after I sold, the timber business went sour for a couple of years.
I moved on and invested in more timberland. I felt I had more strength in timberland than in running a sawmill. Every time we sold a sawmill we bought more timberland. And so now our company, which is still Prineville Sawmill Company, is into timberland management and whole log chipping.
As I have said, I was able to put myself through college buying and selling timber. But I wanted to buy land with timber on it, do a respectable job of logging that timber, and ultimately own the land. It took an awful lot of research and work.
The first tracts of timberland I purchased I spent an awful lot of time on and a lot of sleepless nights. I went to every courthouse in eastern Oregon looking up records--who owned this little chunk of ground and who owned that little chunk of ground. I looked at maps and aerial photos and just generally familiarized myself with private timberlands. I was working full time during the day, and these were things I did on the side and on weekends. Eventually, after making a few transactions, deals started coming my way. My purchases have been in Jefferson, Crook, Wheeler, Grant and Harney Counties, mostly within 50 miles of Prineville.
Our timber has increased in value probably four fold just in the last five years. When the Federal Government no longer sells a fraction of the timber they once sold, it makes my private timber worth just that much more. When we started out, all of the old growth was basically gone, so my timberlands don't look as pristine as those of the national forest. But they are healthy, vigorous and vibrant stands of timber.
There are risks. Fire is a risk if you're looking at long term success. A forest fire can eliminate your future in timber. We attack fire with a vengeance using more equipment than anybody can imagine. In fact, we're almost the laughing stock of forest agencies in the way we attack a fire. In trying to get financing on timberland the very first thing they think about is fire. They don't want to loan you money because it might all burn up.
Disease and bug infestation are other major concerns. Most all of our timberland is adjacent to national forest lands. National forests don't allow spraying for bugs because of environmental concerns about pesticides. I am able to eradicate budworm from my timberland for about $8.00 an acre, but it doesn't do any good if my band of land is three or four miles wide against the Forest Service timber and the budworm flies back on to my timber.
To sum it up, what we do now is we take undesirable pieces of wood and make wood chips. If we can realize a merchantable piece of wood out of anything that we bring into our chip plant, we market that piece to the highest bidder. That might be Ochoco Lumber Company, Crown-Pacific, Warm Springs Lumber Company, or Malheur Lumber Company in John Day.
We have a substantial investment in our chip making plant. It is as modern as any. The chips we produce out of the cull wood are sold to Longview Fibre Company in Longview, Washington or to Weyerhaeuser. Occasionally, we sell to Willamette Industries in Albany, Oregon or CorPine in Bend for the manufacture of particle board. High-grade white fir chips are sorted out and sent to James River Corporation in Camas, Washington.
If we're into some wood that we can't quite get a clean chip out of, we sell it for less money to Georgia-Pacific in Toledo, Oregon. It's what we call 'dirty' chips, those with more than one-half percent bark content. An acceptable chip for high grade paper should have less than one-half percent bark content.
We ship all of our chips by truck because of lower rates than railroad shipments. S.S. Flegel, Danny Azich out of Madras, and a couple of owner-operated trucks contract for us. Some trucks come from the Puget Sound area for chips.
We see ourselves being in this business for at least three more years, assuming we can get enough timber from our own lands or by buying logs to run through the chip making plant. And if the chip making business fizzles, we own our timberland and we do have a program designed for 20 years into the future as to what we will be doing.
We see ourselves as being a viable part of this community in years to come.