The Great Ghost Mill That Never Started

The Strangest Sawmill Story Ever Told

Ghost town are not uncommon in the West. The history of the Westward sweep of civilization in the pioneer days left the mountains and prairies littered with many such. Many of them have been remembered in song and story.

But mostly they were the ghosts o'f mining towns, where the miners 'came surging in and then went sweeping out again as the ore played out.

But here is the story of a ghost sawmill. Certainly the most unusual story of its kind in all lumber history. The story of a great mill, one of the biggest and most modern that the lumber rvorld had yet seen, which came. into existence at the Northernmost tip of the great range of Redwood {orests in California, then passed into oblivion without ever turning a wheel, or cutting a 1og.

Today as you drive along the Redwood Highway in Northern California, passing through virgin Redwood forets, you may see as you pass close to the Humboldt County border three tall, rusty steel smokestacks that are clearly outlined against the still taller trees. These stacks are the skyline markings of the ghost town and sawmill that was once called Andersonia. Today the mill site is a practical wilderness. The forest this mill was built to destroy, claimed it again as the once well laid out sawmill town again became part of the forest primeval.

If you should be by curiosity driven to investigate further the matter of these tall sawmill smokestacks, you would find what is left of what started to be a great industrial enterprise more than forty years ago. You will find the remains of a big mill pond that had been cieated.by a thirty foot high dam across a creek. You find only the remains of the dam which washed out a generation back, carrying a million feet of Redwood logs down the river to be seen no more, and leaving behind another two million feet of logs.

You will find what was once a great sawmill strrrcture alongside that mill pond. It is fallen into decay, as pictures here shown will illustrate. Alongside the mill is a big power plant and boiler house, the six big, expensive boilers still in place on their brick foundations. Other buildings that customarily surround a big sawmill have fallen into the decay that comes with the years. On the top of a nearby hill you can see, if you wish to climb up there, two locomotives. They were specially made by Baldwin for this particular sawmill plant back in the year 1902 or L903. The railroad under them has rotted away and sunk into the ground, and the locomotives that were brand new and shiny when the climax came, have been partially reclaimed by Mother Earth.

By lack Dionne

Yes, you will find what is left of one of the biggest and best sawmills of its time and age, after more than forty vears of wind, weather, and disuse. In this sawmill there was a great ten-foot band headrig built by Allis-Chalmers for cutting big Redwood logs. Also there was a doublecutting eight-foot band mill, for slicing up cants that came from the big band. Farther along there was a mighty resaw, an edger, trimmer, slasher and other equipment for handling a great output of Redwood lumber.

Here is the strange story o,f Andersonia; of the expensive plant that was built and made ready for operation, and then never turned a wheel, but was deliberately left to rot and,go back to nature. Tragedy killed the owner and builder of the mill just as they were preparing to start cutting logs; and the tragedy took the life oT the mill just as 'certainly as a timber in the mill took the life of the owner, Mr. H. N. Anderson.

Why was that mighty sawmill, with a railroad connecting it with the Pacific Ocean, left to rot and go back to nature? It had cost some $800,000, and today would have cost three or four times that amount. Why did the buildings fall apart, the locomotives sink into the hillside, the railroad bridges tumble, with no hand lifted to preserve them ? Some say that it was nor done deliberately, but that a series of strange adversities prevented the salvaging of the fortune invested there. Others think that the devoted family of H. N. Anderson were so shocked by his'death, that they chose to simply forget the whole business, and just left everything as it was the day he died. Anyway,