The Lumber Company That Built a Town
Near Williams, Arizona
Before Williams was a Route Sixty-Six town or a gateway to the Grand Canyon, it was a lumber town, and for the better part of five decades one company dominated that identity. The Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company, incorporated in the early eighteen nineties, built its Williams sawmill soon after and quickly became the largest employer and most powerful institution in town. The company took its name from two Michigan lumber cities, reflecting the origins of the capital and the owners who drove the operation.
The mill burned down in the late eighteen nineties and was rebuilt, and the rebuilt operation ran a private logging railroad into the surrounding ponderosa forest to haul logs to the mill. For four decades, the sound of the mill and the sight of the logging trains defined daily life in Williams. The ponderosa pine of the Colorado Plateau was the raw material, and Williams was positioned perfectly to process it.
The mill supplied timber to construction projects across the Southwest and made the town a significant industrial node in the regional economy. By the nineteen thirties and forties, the timber within practical reach of the Williams operation had been largely depleted. The Saginaw and Manistee company later moved its primary operations to Flagstaff, and the Williams mill closed.
The forest that surrounded the mill, diminished by decades of cutting, has slowly recovered in the years since, and the ponderosa pines that shade the highways into Williams today are the successors of the forest that the mill consumed.
