New sawmill rekindles memories of old Mill B

The plans to build a modern sawmill along the Snohomish River over the ashes of the Weyerhaeuser Corp.’s old Mill B in Everett made national news last week.

The story transmitted around the country on the Associated Press wire focused on the fact that a new lumber mill in what was once timber country is a rare thing these days.

The spokesman for California- based Sierra Pacific Industries told me a couple of weeks ago that what the company is building these days is “not your father’s lumber mill. Or your grandfather’s.”

As Martha Stewart would say, “That’s a good thing.”

I got a taste of what Mill B was like over lunch last week with Mike Hudon of Lake Stevens. Constructed in 1915, the mill later became Hudon’s lumber mill, as well as his father’s, who retired from Weyerhaeuser.

Hudon, 57, only worked there a while after high school before joining the U.S. Army and going to Vietnam.

From his description, it sounds like the Mill B job, in which he did general labor, was great military training.

Early on, he said, a co-worker picked up a huge sawtooth blade, told him to listen and hurled it against something.

“He told me, ‘If you ever hear this, run and duck behind the equipment because that meant the saw was exploding,’” Hudon said.

Later, he discovered that metal saw fragments were embedded in the walls all over the place. “If the saw hit a spike or a hard knot and seized up, the teeth were like bullets flying through the mill,” he said.

When it was opened in 1915, Mill B was the most modern in the world and second in size only to a mill in Sweden. There were 500 electric motors to power the huge amount of equipment.

Mill B was designed to handle old-growth fir. And to cut a lot of it. Right out of the chute, it could cut 400,000 feet of lumber in eight hours. Soon after, it was increased to cut 1 million feet on a shift, according to a history of Everett by Lawrence O’Donnell.

In the mid-1960s, Hudon’s Mill B was aging but still highly productive. The wooden walkways had paths worn down through the timbers, but the older equipment turned out a lot of lumber, still from fairly big timber.

Hudon remembers the occasional log that was so big only one could fit on a truck.

Unlike today, where logs are measured by lasers and cut by computer-driven saws some distance from the operator, Mill B saws were manipulated by people standing nearby so they could eyeball the timber. And the log slabs were moved down conveyors by people like Hudon who had to jump on top of them at times to maneuver them in the right direction.

“It was grisly work,” he said. “People were hurt all the time,”

He laughed when remembering a sign in the cafeteria that said the mill had gone 12 days without a lost-time accident. “That was a record,” he said. “Twelve days where nobody had gotten hurt.”

Hudon wasn’t suggesting that the company didn’t care about safety.

He recalls a day when a wooden slab got caught in a saw and was spit out, battering a stairwell to the saw filers’ shack. “It took the whole stairwell out,” Hudon said. “They sent everybody home and installed an armor shield that was 2 inches thick just in case it ever happened again.”

Hudon said the physical nature of the work and the old equipment made accidents commonplace.

“The mill was built in another time,” he said. “It was like the steel mills back east.”

Hudon is glad to see a new mill right where Mill B existed before it was closed down and later set on fire, likely by vagrants.

“It’s appropriate for that spot,” Hudon said. “It makes me think about how times are changing.”

Mission Beach’s Peter Walton – of Walton Lumber Co., which operated from 1913 to 1960 – agrees with Hudon.

“The main purpose for founding the city of Everett back in 1892 was the wood industry with its sawmills and shingle mills,” he wrote in a letter. “How appropriate that a new sawmill bay be built on the site of Mill B – once the pride of the industry. We have now gone full circle.”

Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.