The Long Run of Timber

The mill at Bonner, five miles east of Missoula on the Blackfoot River, ran continuously from eighteen eighty-six until two thousand eight. That is a hundred and twenty-two years of logs, blades, and sawdust, longer than most American institutions of any kind.

The Blackfoot mill was built by a merchant named Andrew Hammond, who understood early that the Northern Pacific Railroad's arrival would create demand for timber at a scale the region had never seen before. He contracted with the railroad to supply lumber and ties, and when he had satisfied that contract, he kept going. In eighteen ninety-eight, Hammond sold the mill and its surrounding timberlands for nearly one and a half million dollars to Marcus Daly and his Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Anaconda needed timber for a different purpose: the underground mine tunnels in Butte consumed enormous quantities of wood for structural support, and the Bonner mill was one of the most reliable sources.

The Anaconda Company eventually controlled most of the timber cutting in the drainage between nineteen hundred and nineteen thirty, harvesting old-growth forest from what is now the Lubrecht Experimental Forest northeast of Missoula. The mill changed corporate hands several times: Anaconda, then Champion International in nineteen seventy-two, then Stimson Lumber, before Stimson closed it in two thousand eight when the housing market collapsed.

The closure ended more than a century of the industry that had defined the valley's economy. Missoula had diversified by then, through the university, healthcare, services, and a growing outdoor recreation sector, but the Bonner mill had been a presence in the background of all of it, the sound of timber country underneath the college town, operating until it simply stopped.