The Lumber Empire Above Oakhurst
Near Oakhurst, California
The forests above Oakhurst once fed one of the largest lumber operations in nineteenth-century California. The California Lumber Company established its mill operations in this region beginning in eighteen seventy four, and for nearly sixty years the sound of the saw defined the upper slopes of the Sierra Nevada around what is now Oakhurst. What made the company remarkable was its engineering.
Moving timber down from the mountains required creative solutions, and the company built two of them. A narrow-gauge railroad crawled through roughly thirty miles of mountain terrain, linking the cutting areas in the high forest to the mill sites below. And a flume, an open wooden channel that used water to float logs downhill, dropped timber roughly four thousand five hundred feet in elevation over fifty four miles of winding canyon.
The flume was one of the engineering spectacles of its era, and tourists came specifically to ride wooden boats down the chute alongside the lumber. At peak operation, the company employed roughly sixteen hundred workers. Entire communities existed in the high forest to support the logging.
When the accessible timber was exhausted, the company scaled back and eventually closed its main operations in the early nineteen thirties. The forest has regrown considerably since then, but the deep cuts and remnant structures of that logging era remain visible in the Sierra Nevada above Oakhurst today.
