EVERETT – Back in the 1960s, Fred Buse decided to take a gamble on an emerging new market for lumber cut from alder trees.
People must have looked at him funny. The prevailing wisdom in the Northwest back in those days was that twisty broadleaf alders were little more than weeds with bark.
One saw salesman told him flat out it was a bad idea, said Bob Buse, his son. “I remember him telling Dad, ‘Fred, you’re crazy. This’ll never amount to anything.’”
But decades later, the Buse family’s Smith Street Mill is still cutting alder logs into lumber, recording sales of $4 million a year, and celebrating having lasted 50 years in a business that is slowly disappearing throughout the Northwest.
The alder trees “they were valueless,” Bob Buse said. “Now they’re as valuable as Douglas fir.”
The Buse family has played a big role in the history of Snohomish County’s timber industry. Brothers Delmar and Norm Buse founded the Buse Timber mill on Smith Island in 1946; their descendants ran the mill until 2004, when they sold it to a group of employees.
Fred Buse, Delmar and Norm’s brother, bought the Smith Street Mill in 1956. He’s gone, but his widow, Mary, still keeps the books for the company. Sons Bob, Jim and Dwayne still work there, as do some of their children – a fourth generation of Buses in the timber business.
Smith Street began by supplying stud lumber for buildings. The 1960s switch to cutting alder got the family mill into a more profitable market, supplying raw materials to furniture makers.
Alder, Bob Buse said, “is a unique wood. It’s very easily machined, it doesn’t splinter and it finishes very nice.” Experienced woodworkers can finish it to look like more expensive cherry, he said. Doors and headboards often are made from the wood cut at Smith Street.
Alder only grows along the narrow strip between the Cascades and the Pacific coast, from southern Oregon into British Columbia. Smith Street ships its lumber around the world. Last week, it sent out shipments to Canada, China and Guatemala, Buse said. “We sometimes ship to Germany and Italy.”
The advent of the sealed shipping container made it all possible, he said.
Alder grows in wetlands, and when green, it’s about half water by weight. Careful kiln drying – a process that takes a week – makes usable lumber, but all it would take is a day sitting in the rain on some far-off dock to ruin the wood, Bob Buse said.
Like the product it produces, the mill itself has changed in a half-century. Lasers now show sawyers where to make the best cuts, and a computer runs the heaters and fans in the brand-new kiln.
“You can’t just blast it with hot air, because you’d ruin the lumber,” he said.
Mill workers save scraps, bark and sawdust that used to be dumped as trash. Some is sold to paper mills, some becomes beauty bark, the rest is burned to generate steam used to cure the boards.
“Things we used to do, you can’t afford to do anymore,” Bob Buse said. “Processes change. Equipment changes. There’s computers now – automation here and automation there that just wasn’t there before.”
Bob Buse said he started working at the mill during high school, and never thought of doing anything else.
Running a mill “has its moments,” he said. “If it were really easy, there would be 100 guys in the business.”
Will he stick around for the next 50 years? Buse laughed. It’s only lasted this long, he said, through “a lot of hard work and the grace of God.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
Michael O’Leary / The Herald
Bob Buse is one of the owners of the Smith Street Mill in Everett. The mill trims alder and ships it to furniture makers.
Alder is trimmed to boards for furniture construction at the Smith Street Mill in Everett.
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