MIDLAND — The wood-planing machines at the Opco Inc. mill in Midland are noisy, but neighbor Leona Turosik, 86, doesn’t mind — especially now that the mill might close.
“Keep it goin’,” she said, patting the arm of mill owner Eric Opgenorth during a recent visit. “I love that music.”
It’s a tune she’s heard those same machines hum since her family, the Basketts, opened the raw lumber mill in 1929.
“They’d start out with a chug, chug, chug,” her brother Steve Baskett Jr., now 83, said of the boilers he’d fire up early each morning when he worked at the mill.
But the music could stop soon. Crumbling profits have forced Opgenorth to put the business and its 1.5-acre property at 9710 E. Portland Ave. up for sale.
Teetering on the edge of extinction, the Opco mill is a symbol of Midland’s search for identity in an economic landscape that has, in many ways, left it behind.
Though the real estate sign out front beckons buyers, Opgenorth said he’d rather see business pick up so he could keep running the mill, which his father bought from the Basketts in 1992.
“It can’t get any worse,” said Opgenorth, who’s been taking paychecks sparingly the past few months to help keep the mill afloat. “Hopefully, it turns around and gets a little busier, and I might take my for-sale sign down.”
He said the $250,000 worth of business his company did last year is one-fourth of what it’s earned in years past.
Two workers pushing planks through an 87-year-old planing machine are what’s left of the 12-person work force Opco once had.
Residents of Midland’s semi-rural community fear the property is more likely to become another strip mall, senior citizen condominium or empty lot if sold, said Ed Hennings, a Central Pierce Fire &Rescue firefighter and Midland resident.
But their greatest loss, should the mill disappear, would be a treasured piece of history that bears the marks of nearly every economic season of the past century.
The mill once marked the center of the community at 97th Street and Portland Avenue, said Hennings, a passionate historian of all things Midland. He said Midland first got its name in 1890 for being the midpoint on the trolley line from Tacoma to Puyallup.
Turosik said her father, Steve Baskett Sr., bought the land for the mill in 1919 and, after losing his $3-per-day job at one of the many lumber companies that closed during the Depression, began building the Baskett Lumber Co.
In the meantime, he used the wheel from his Ford Model T truck as a power source and planed lumber at half price after driving home from part-time work.
With the help of nine children, especially the six boys, the Basketts built the mill and started doing business in 1929.
“After he opened the mill, it just kept growing and then things got better,” said Steve Baskett Jr., who ran the mill with his wife and Turosik, his sister, from 1985 to 1992. “I used to kiss people’s shoes in order to get business when I had it. You’ve got to want to do it.”
Baskett, along with his eight siblings and eventually most of their children and grandchildren, devoted his working years to the mill, not counting the two years he served in World War II with his brother.
“The mill was sort of the centerpiece of the Midland community in terms of its economic engine,” said Pierce County Councilwoman Barbara Gelman, whose district includes Midland.
She said she is working with the newly formed Business Administration of Midland to rebuild commerce in the community, which has sloped from its 1940s height to, in many cases, mere shells of the businesses that once boomed along Portland Avenue.
Cindy Beckett, a founding member of the new business group, said she and other active Midland residents are “gung ho” about revitalizing the community.
“It’s really just recovering what we used to have here,” Beckett said. “When you look at that, we were a thriving shopping district and now we look like a Detroit slum. That tells you something.”
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