Timber Capital of the Pines

For much of the twentieth century, Klamath Falls lived and breathed timber. The surrounding mountains held vast stands of ponderosa pine, and the wood was ideal for making boxes and crates, especially for California's booming fruit orchards. The great change came in nineteen oh nine, when the Southern Pacific Railroad finally reached town.

Overnight, land speculators poured in, and the small settlement of a few hundred people swelled into a busy lumber town within a year or two. The Weyerhaeuser company had already been buying up huge tracts of forest, controlling well over one hundred fifty thousand acres by nineteen oh eight, and in nineteen twenty nine it opened a large sawmill in Klamath Falls, complete with a planing mill, drying kilns, and a box factory. Along with the city of Bend, Klamath Falls became one of the great centers of pine lumber production in the nation.

The mills ran day and night, and the smell of cut pine hung over the valley. When the timber industry declined late in the century, the city had to reinvent itself, but its street grid, its old brick downtown, and its very existence were built on the back of the pine.