Author: Dave Halsey

It was about noon on Monday, November 9, and somewhere around 55 or 60 degrees at the farm in Newberg. I parked the Land Cruiser and walked out to pick the end of the season’s fruit.

The persimmon tree is down toward the end, so you have to walk past everything else to get to it. The prunes, plums, apricots, the cherries, the figs, the pears, the apples. The leaves were down and the fruit was long gone. This time of year all that’s left is the wood. Every branch out in the open, gray and bare, like bones. Ready for pruning.

I spend a lot of time figuring out what a tree is worth after it comes down. Board feet and grade. Out here on the farm nobody cuts anything but a few branches in the winter. Me and the boys did that for many years. Recently Juan, who leases the ground, took on the pruning with his crew in place of a lease increase. Took me a couple hours to show them how I like it done. These trees stand where they were planted, most of them twenty-five years ago now, and every year they hand you something. Nobody has ever sprayed them. No pesticide, chemical or compound, so the crop is clean.

The cherries come first. They bloom first and ripen first, and you have to get to them before the birds do. Walking under them in November I remember eating them off the branch six months ago. Hard not to eat too many, especially the Rainiers. Persimmons are the same deal at the other end of the year. You get there ahead of the birds or you don’t get much.

This year, I got there ahead of the birds, mostly. The persimmons were hanging like little orange ornaments, shaped like tiny pumpkins. A couple of bags’ worth this year. I picked them all and stuffed both bags, maybe twenty pounds each.

Most were soft enough to eat. I peeled one, cut it into quarters, and popped them into my mouth right there under the tree. Sweet. Orange all the way through. No seeds. My tree almost never makes a seed. The big persimmons have dark brown seeds in them, but for some reason mine come small, a little smaller than an orange, and clean inside.

That’s the part I love. Fruit from trees is almost free. The trees do all the work. They take the sun, the rain and the bees and turn them into fruit of all kinds, year after year, and once a year, at varying times from June to November, each one turns some of that into something you can eat off the branch. Twenty-five years of that in Newberg. Nothing on it but what fell out of the sky. It’s good for you and you know exactly where it came from: real food.

They keep a few weeks in the fridge. Most of these will go to Thanksgiving, sliced onto salads and handed out to whoever wants some.

I was back at the Land Cruiser at one o’clock with the two bags. An hour, start to finish.

For most of my working life I have quoted a wood I never saw in place. Yellow cedar, clear, vertical grain, cut to lengths the buyer spelled out to the millimeter. The orders came through Patrick Lumber Export, and before that through the cedar yard I ran in Hayward in the nineties. We called it temple wood. The buyers knew exactly what they wanted. I knew the grade book. That was about as far as it went.

In October 2026 Jan and I spent the back half of a Japan trip in Hida, in the mountains of Gifu. Hida-Furukawa one day, then Takayama. The rain came mostly at night, so we were lucky.

The hillsides there are solid sugi, planted after the war. Some cypress, a little pine. Dark even-aged blocks run straight up the slopes and stop at a hard edge against the native broadleaf, which was in fall color. Tall stems, crowns at the top, most of it unthinned and all of it merchantable. There is more of it than Japan can use, and some is already moving to the United States. I made a note.

Hida-Furukawa is a small town and the village the Hida Takumi carpenters come from. Thirteen hundred years of woodworking. The town is built small and every piece of it is detailed. Each builder family has a signature it cuts into the beams. At the Takumi Culture Museum the staff walked us through the joinery puzzles and the joints that make them work, the corbels and the brackets under the eaves, the saws with wooden handles. We fumbled the puzzles. They were patient. I did not understand yet what they were showing us. It came clear later in the week, in every temple and shrine we walked into. That is how the whole country holds together, without a bracket or a nail.

Down the street at FabCafe Hida the coffee comes with a wood shop. Hidakuma runs it, in a house more than a hundred years old, and the city owns a piece of the company. They take small diameter mixed broadleaf that used to go to the chipper and make furniture out of it. In the storehouse the off-grade boards and burls sell by weight, one yen per gram, every species the same. We have been trying to keep bigleaf maple out of the chipper for twenty years. Somebody in Hida figured out how to price it.

The Japanese have a word for growing up around wood. Mokuiku. Wood education. You see it in the furniture shops in Takayama and in the way a clerk sets a piece down.

At Ankokuji the priest’s wife let us into the sutra library. The temple goes back to the 1300s and the rotating bookcase inside it dates to 1408. Eight sides, all wood, a National Treasure, the oldest of its kind in Japan. We put our hands on it and turned it one full turn. Smooth and steady after six hundred years. I have handled a lot of old wood. I had not handled anything like that.

Sakurayama Hachimangu is a shrine, not a temple, up the hill on the east side of Takayama. We got there at ten in the morning expecting a look. We got the whole ceremony. At a quarter past we washed our hands. At twenty past we were seated and the drums started. The priest came out. The room was all wood and all clear, vertical grain, light colored, hinoki I am fairly sure. Not a knot in it.

Somewhere around twenty-five to eleven it landed. I was sitting inside the order. Thirty years of quotes, lengths, moisture, grade. The buyer on the other end of the fax was building this. I had never once asked what the room would feel like. Now I was in it, and I knew why they wanted that wood and no other. It was not something I saw or heard. Every sense in the room was busy and none of them was doing it. It was a knowing with no name.

There is a book by a forester at the University of British Columbia about the fungus under a forest floor, the network that ties the roots together and moves water and sugar from tree to tree. You never see it. Dig and you tear it. It is the reason the forest stands as one thing and not as a crowd of trunks. Wood in Japan is like that. It is under everything. The station walls, the coffee shop, the bath, the shrine. Nobody points at it. It is what holds the culture up.

Here is the part I did not expect. The people who know it best are not relaxed about it. The museum staff teach the joints to tourists who cannot work the puzzles. The city puts money into a coffee shop so the small logs get a price. Somebody made up a word so children would learn to feel a board. The network under a forest tends itself. A culture does not. The ones in the know have to keep it up on purpose, every year, or it goes.

By five to eleven we were walking out and I was in a daze. I tried to tell Laura, our guide from Canada, what had just happened. I am not sure I got it across. At eleven Jan and I left the group and found a latte along the river in town. I had a clear head. Enlightened, if that is the word for it. I think it is.

My son Nick plays the cello. Because of him I have spent years watching that section more than the others, and I have trained myself to listen for it. Cellos first, then the basses and the violins. The wooden instruments. I know there is wood in the woodwinds and the drums too. But Nick plays the cello, so that is where my ear goes.

In early December 2022, Nick, Jan and I were in New York. We walked all over Manhattan looking at buildings. On Saturday the 3rd we were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and found a room of horns called Fanfare. I remembered hundreds. The Met says seventy-four. Nick plays the trumpet too, so I was looking for the trumpets. Not one horn in that room was making a sound. But you could hear them, and feel the joy in Nick’s movements. I took some pictures of him through the hanging displays. Makes me smile.

That night we went to hear the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall. It sits at Lincoln Center, a few blocks up Broadway from the southwest corner of Central Park. The hall had reopened that October after they gutted the inside and rebuilt it. Eight o’clock. The seats now wrap around the stage and around the whole room, and ours were above the cellos. Twelve of them, I think.

Emanuel Ax played Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, and it was great. But the whole concert, I was listening to the cellos. They reverberated more than I had ever heard. They were richer. I had never experienced depth like that. Maybe it was the combination of violins, violas, cellos and basses, but the cellos in particular were outstanding. It was the ocean. Nothing else has so much complexity and depth, so many sounds at once, and is so moving.

I figured it was probably in the design of the hall. And it was. Working at a lumber company in Oregon, it’s natural to look at how wood is used, designed and fabricated. The walls are beech, milled into shallow waves. The waves scatter the high notes. The bass comes from how the boards are hung. The old walls had an air space behind them, and it cut the low end. The new beech is anchored solid to plaster over the concrete block. The board is married to the wall behind it.

It is like going inside a giant musical instrument and listening. To me the room is shaped like the inside of a cello. You have to be there to really understand it. Describing a glass of Oregon Pinot is nothing like drinking it on the hillside, under the oaks, where the barrel came from. You also have to come with an open mind. That is not easy.

The last piece was Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony. The orchestra had never played it before that week. When it ended, the hall stood up. I was looking down at the cellos, hoping one of them would look up. One did. We made eye contact and held it a couple of extra beats. I tried to let her know how much I appreciated it.

Then it was ten o’clock.

https://www.salmonbendartstudios.com

About the gallery:

Salmon Bend Art Studios is an artist-run gallery in the heart of the Sacramento River Valley. It is open to the public for a few weekends per year during its annual Winter Show.

Converted from a prune drying barn by artist Gabe Babcock in 2019, the gallery space is the loading bay where horse-drawn carts once unloaded boxes of prunes for processing. The steel tracks that transported pallets of prunes to the dryer are still a part of the adjoining sculpture studio and woodshop.

Across the yard from the gallery stands the Tea House. 

It was originally built in the 1940’s by Bill Halsey (inventor of the Halsey Prune Harvester, the first mechanical tree shaker) for Akiji Yoshimura and his family.

Akiji Yoshimura served the U.S. military as a Japanese-American interpreter during WWII. While he served, his wife Hezi Yoshimura was forcibly incarcerated at the Tule Lake Internment Camp simply because of her Japanese heritage. When Akiji returned home to Colusa after the war, he and Hezi were barred from buying a house west of Tenth Street, motivating Bill Halsey to offer them a home.

In 2018, Bill’s nephew Warren Halsey hired Gabe Babcock to renovate and re-imagine the orchard house. Inspired by the deep canyons of the Sierras and piles of

About the Artists:

• Gabe Babcock
• Roberta Monte James
• LK James

Thank you to the Halsey Family Warren and Laurie, and their daughter Kim who have made all of this possible with their generous creative vision for this land.

We started where the granite falls,

flipping ties above Yosemite’s walls,

and something in the blood said go,

not fast, not straight, but north and slow.

To Jenner where the river drowns,

we pulled the old barns to the ground,

then east through Colusa’s heat

to lay the prunes and walnuts sweet

in rows that dried beneath the sun,

work for winter, never done.

Up the Sierra’s golden seams

we panned the creeks and cut the means,

built the roads that let men pass,

then doubled back toward Pacific glass.

A zigzag stitch across the map,

but every loop drew north a lap.

On Airport Road the spruce came down,

Port Orford cedar, pale as the crown

of morning, honey-grained and light,

we traded straight for valley right,

for fruit and nut and earth to own.

The buyer drowned it under cranberry alone.

Alpine waited, in between,

too young to log, too spent to clean,

worn thin by hands that came before.

But we could read what it was for.

The lesson there ran deep and true,

the land remembers what you do.

And every generation hands

the work, the wager, and the lands

to those who come behind the plow,

some clumsy, some who keep the vow.

The teaching passed from kin to kin

was how to tend, to heal, to mend again,

to read the soil and know its worth,

to give back more than we took from earth.

We learned the names of what is rare,

the things that live almost nowhere,

the Fender’s blue on lupine wing,

the Kincaid’s bloom, the small soft things,

the daisy, larkspur, checkermallow,

roots that hold the wet and fallow.

We kept it. Kept on climbing too,

till the green Willamette opened through.

Here the white oaks hold their ground,

a hundred winters, two, around

the camas fields our oldest kin

laid down before the world grew thin,

ten thousand springs of patient hands

who burned and tended, read the land.

So this is where the migration ends,

where root and labor finally blends:

the oak stands guard, the elk move slow,

the bees go where the blue blooms grow,

and one late monarch, fourth of its line,

rides the long migration home.

On a Wednesday in September of 1992, my dad called about a farm. Two hundred sixty-five acres in the Willamette Valley had come up, and he wanted to know if it had promise. Back then unirrigated farmland in the area went for something like a thousand dollars an acre. It still blows my mind to say that out loud.

I drove down to have a look. About a third of it was forest. Another third was good farmland. One border ran along Muddy Creek. There was an old farmstead and a trailer where a mother and daughter lived, eighty and fifty-five years old. Up on the hills between the fields and the timber sat a couple of five-acre Christmas tree farms. In between lay oak prairie and savanna, the kind of open ground where a few trees had been standing long before any of us showed up.

A forester in Corvallis named Bob Latham found it. He figured the timber was too young to cut, but he passed it along anyway. I parked at the northeast corner and hiked straight up through the forest.

What I walked into didn’t look like young trees. It looked like a harvestable stand. There was Douglas fir sixteen, eighteen, twenty inches through and a good eighty to one hundred and twenty feet tall, a lot of them climbing right up over the oaks. You could read the whole history standing there. It had been oak country once, open ground, grazed by cattle. Somewhere in the late fifties or early sixties the cattle went away. And out in that old pasture stood three big Douglas firs, forty to fifty inches across, with huge limbs, the kind a tree only throws when it grows up alone in the open. Those three had seeded the whole hillside, ninety or a hundred acres of forest, in thirty or forty years.

Jack put his hands on that ground years later. “I remember growing up,” he wrote, “the smell of the air and soil was different under the oaks than it was in the forest.” He was right, and standing up there in ’92 I was looking at the reason for it. The fir had taken the high seat. The Oregon white oaks underneath were fighting for light and losing.

When I broke out on top, the view stopped me cold. I don’t remember whether I found a phone booth on the way home or waited until I got there. Either way the call was short. “This is a gem. We need to buy it.”

A week later I drove Jan down and we walked it together. We loved it.

My folks ended up buying it on their own. Before long they’d hired an architect named Gary Day and built a house near where I had come out of the forest. I supplied much of the lumber for it, beams and framing and siding and finish, hauled in by good friends in the business. When the house was finished, they named it Raindance Ranch.

All three of our boys arrived in the years after. Nick, Jack, and Zack grew up out there, playing, hiking, planting, working. That ground is in them and always will be.

The oaks got their due eventually. There’s oak savanna out there now, restored, a lot of hard work in it. A researcher from the Corvallis area, Dennis Albert, studied a piece of one of the old oaks that had fallen and counted the rings back to 1608.

Jack runs the Oswego Lake Watershed Council these days, and those trees never left him. “My grandparents introduced me to oak trees in 1996 on their ranch in the Willamette Valley,” he wrote not long ago, “a playground of ponds, creeks, crops, woods, pasture, oak prairie, and savanna.” He thinks about them the way you think about elders. “These trees are older than me,” he wrote, “but their young offspring are brand new. Each acorn carries the story of its ancestors and the memory of the place.” And about what it means to have land like that handed down: “These trees have grown under the care, or neglect, of many generations. Each generation has both the benefits and the responsibilities of the land.”

He calls an oak a memory and a connector. He got that right.

Most of the timber out there is seventy to eighty years old now. The old farmhouse still stands next to an older orchard, and the new orchard up by the house, near where I came out of the forest thirty-three years ago, has filled all the way in. The wildlife flourishes. Back in that ninety acres of fir, though, the oaks are mostly gone, nine hundred, maybe twelve hundred of them in there once, most of them dead now, a few still hanging on with a branch or two of leaves.

Which brings me to a table.

When I was a senior in high school I took wood shop, like I had every year, but that last year I wanted something big. My dad had two thick redwood slabs he’d salvaged from a log that had rolled to the bottom of a canyon decades before. Somebody had cut it up, chainsaw or otherwise, and the slabs ran four or five inches thick. I built a table out of one of them, posts, rails, and that big slab on top. When I finished it, it went to my dad’s forestry company and sat in the conference room at Hammon, Jensen & Wallen for a few years.

When my dad left the firm, we had to get the table out. My best man, Bruce Nikolai, who I grew up with back in Orinda, and I, and a couple of others, stood there working out that the thing was too big to fit through the office door. So we slid a window open and took it out that way.

It sits at Raindance Ranch now, out past Monroe toward Alpine, on ground that was holding its own trees long before it ever held that table.

I met Ken DeLong down in the Bay Area fifteen or twenty years ago. We had been selling his company, Kelleher, some cedar clears and a little Doug fir. A guy named Jeff Barnes was buying it and shipping most of it to Home Depot. I wanted to see who these people were, so I went over to their branch in Novato, out at Blackpoint. Kelleher was sold in 2025 to Woodgrain. Don Kelleher, well into his eighties, chose retirement and financial security over the operational challenge that running a five distribution yard operation can be.

I walk in and there’s just these dudes, kicking around, laughing, having a good time in the middle of a workday. That was the whole first impression. Not a quiet sales floor with everybody’s head down. A crew.

I had actually been introduced to Ken over the phone by Chris Shively out in Hawaii, who I was shipping Doug fir lumber and moldings to. Chris said you have got to get down to Novato and meet Ken. So I did. And during that visit, I remember Ed Schurr saying, Kenny, you have to get Dave to come to your golf tournament. I had no idea what that was, but I was about to find out.

Turns out Ken had had a heart transplant, and the golf tournament was a lot more than golf. They played poker the night before. They golfed. They went bowling. Maybe there were darts, I honestly can’t remember, there was so much going on. It was an all day and all night affair. I went down for it a few times and it was an absolute blast. Those guys took me in like I was one of them, like I had grown up with their crew in Marin County and played ball with them since high school, which I hadn’t. They just decided I was family. That meant something to me.

The business was easy because we spoke the same language. Honesty and common sense, that was it, our guide. Over the years we kept adding to it, cedar, hemlock, moldings. Good years, great people.

Then Ken’s brother Jim moved up to Oregon, right around the start of the pandemic. Ken came up to see him, and the four of us, Ken, Jim, Jack Alley, and me, went down and golfed Bandon Dunes, which is about as good as golf gets on the Oregon coast. We visited Oregon Overseas Timber. We toured up through the valley, McCool Millwork, our plant in Philomath, the works. Good meals along the way, the last one outside overlooking the Pacific.

The whole visit, Jim kept eyeing our low grade. The falldowns, the cedar and fir that comes off the bottom of the run, and he kept asking me, how much is this, how much is that. Finally I said, you keep asking, let’s just send you a truckload and see if you can sell it.

So we did. Shipped a load down to Bandon. Jim put it up on Craigslist, and before I knew it he was calling to buy another. At that point we are talking a hundred dollars a thousand. Dirt cheap. Two thousand dollars for an entire semi load of lumber. Beaded ceiling, tongue and groove, bevel siding, surfaced boards of every size, handrail, short stuff, knots, splits, none of it mattered. Jim sold all of it. Some of it I think he moved as grilling planks, since he was on the coast in salmon country. Dozens of semi loads over a few years, out of the back of a truck, unloaded with a tractor at his friend’s farm.

Handrail is its own little world, and Jim moved that too. We have run a lot of profiles over the years, but it is only a fraction of what is out there, every shape and size and species you can think of. Solid wood, and laminated too, up and down or side to side once the sections get big. Move around the world and the species change with the place. On the West Coast it is mostly Douglas fir, a little redwood, some red cedar. My favorite by far is yellow cedar. It doesn’t splinter, it works easy, and it weathers to a soft silver gray. I have replaced handrails with it myself. There is a run of it in my house near Corvallis, sixteen or eighteen feet, going down into the basement. Not original, but smooth as silk, and it will be there long after I am gone.

It was the simplest business I have ever done. A handshake deal without the handshake, implied from day one. Every month or so a check would show up for the last load shipped, with a note asking for another. No contracts. No back and forth. Those two were about the most trustworthy, honest guys I have ever dealt with. And they knew how to have a good time.

I talked with Kenny a few days before he passed. His heart was finally giving out, and he was calling me from his hospital room. He wanted more lumber shipped. Still living the dream, right to the end. We had a great talk. It hurts and makes me smile, both at once, every time I think of him.

Cris Schureman and Martin Schwab and I have skied knee-deep powder in Steamboat and sipped Goldschlager in Breckenridge. We’ve also spent a night in a $20 hostel, in the depths of the great recession in July of 2009. Good times and lean ones, same three guys.
I got to know them in the early ’90s, when they became good customers of mine at KD Cedar Supply. They were the Specialty wood salesmen in Denver back when both of our companies were subsidiaries of Tumac Lumber in Portland. When my time at Tumac ended and my time at Patrick Lumber began in 1997, they were among my first customers. We quickly became friends, all of us raising families and sharing the same values. Honesty, and sometimes being overly direct, somehow only strengthened the bond.
I’ll own the overly direct part. There’s a little wooden Buddha on my desk, three or four inches across, that I picked up in Vietnam in 2020, right before the pandemic. I bought it off the man who carved it. About halfway down the country we walked through a village, crossed a channel in a rickety little rowboat, and on the far bank a couple had their carvings out on a few stands. The fellow in back had a whole row of Buddhas, most of them finished, but he was working on one, and that was the one I wanted, right out of his hand. It took some doing to pry it loose, and I’m sure I paid twice what I should have, but I wanted that one because it wasn’t done. I rub its belly three times a day, and I rub the belly of every Buddha I pass, three times, same deal. That little guy has done me a lot of good. He reminds me to ease up, to let the stress that comes with this business roll off, and he makes me smile every time. Cris and Martin had years of me at full throttle before he ever landed on my desk, and they stuck around anyway.
Before long they got the urge to start out on their own, and they asked whether Patrick would finance the venture. Of course, I said. Bob McCracken believed in empowerment theory, and he was hungry for new ideas to rebuild the business after a tumultuous decade in the ’90s. The concept became Wood Source, and they went to work. Wood flowed in, and before long our old company was caught peeking over the fence. That’s when we knew we’d made it.
Our first yard was barely a yard at all. A right-of-way, a strip of land maybe a hundred feet by five hundred, wedged between a dive bar and the freeway just south of Golden. We ran there for a few years before we moved over next to Reed Mill, where they leased us a rugged, triangular piece fenced in between another freeway and the road. We worked out of there for the better part of a decade, and it taught us a few things. The freeway flooded us out once, all that road water coming straight into the yard. And we had men stealing beams off the back side, right over the razor wire. Big timbers, twelve by twelves, twenty-four feet long. They’d roll them off the top of the pile down onto the railroad tracks. It takes six or eight men to carry a twelve by twelve that long, so they were coming in a crew, and we finally caught them on camera.
Eventually we put a deal together and bought our own ground in Thornton, and developed half of it. That’s where we’ve been ever since. Quieter out there. When we first moved in you could look across the street and watch the buffalo roaming. I don’t think they’re there anymore.
Martin’s creativity and the grit and determination that define Cris made the partnership an instant success. You buy lumber and you sell lumber, what’s hard about that? Plenty, when you’re new. Suppliers wanted volume before they’d open a line, and that was never a problem with these two. Cris and Martin were like a giant termite. Everything you shipped them, they consumed. When Sierra Pacific agreed to sell us eight loads of incense cedar, one of their big multi-state distributors called a meeting at SPI headquarters to fight it. Brad Mehl, our salesman at SPI then, went to bat for us in that boardroom, made the case, and won.
Cris and Martin had their first million-dollar sales month in October of 2003. To celebrate, they opened a bottle of wine with a story behind it and then went back to work. By then they were the fourth and fifth shareholders in Patrick’s fourth generation of ownership.
Cris and Martin are two of the best sales guys I have ever known. They have put an immense amount of high-grade lumber into the Colorado Rockies, and a good deal more into markets well beyond it. It has been a great ride.

https://www.opb.org/article/2023/11/15/new-lumber-mill-in-philomath-aims-to-market-oregon-hardwoods/

The Hardwood Mill

In November of 2023 I sat down with Dave Miller on OPB’s Think Out Loud to talk about something new for Patrick Lumber. We’ve been at this since 1915 — 108 years — and the company has changed shape more than once. We started as an office wholesale broker and over time became a secondary manufacturer, taking wood from sawmills up and down the west coast and refining it for furniture, flooring, windows, doors and cabinetry. For most of that history the wood was softwood: Doug fir, hemlock, red cedar, the species you see growing out here.

But there’s another resource in these woods nobody was using. As forest managers thin the western Oregon forests for fire protection, the hardwoods come down too: oak, several species of it, plus maple, madrone, ash, even walnut, which isn’t native but grows here just fine. A dozen species could be milled into lumber. Instead most of it gets burned, chipped for pulp, cut into firewood or hauled to the landfill. That always struck me as a waste. There’s far more of it than we could ever process, but we can make a difference, and lumber is a better use for a beautiful tree.

And some of it is beautiful. The figured maple around here has grain that looks like marble or granite, and there’s a grade called fiddleback that goes straight into violins and cellos. My own favorite is walnut: that deep, dark, rich color never gets old. You see the live-edge slabs coming off these logs for countertops and tables and they’re really pieces of artwork. Every tree has its own story.

Here’s the part people enjoy. We bought the Philomath site in 2016, the old Mary’s River Lumber yard that cut western red cedar, and we bought it mostly for the kilns. Next door sat a ten-acre parcel we didn’t think much about, until one day the DEA showed up and arrested an outfit growing marijuana illegally on it. Six months later we were able to buy that ground, and that’s exactly where the new mill is going. You can’t make this stuff up.

We did a trial run first on a little Wood-Mizer, cut a few species, proved we could dry the lumber, and sold the stock. Oak is stubborn, it takes its time. Production came in 2025. We’ll pay a family living wage, right next to Corvallis and Oregon State’s forestry program, in a town that’s always been a timber town.

I’m an OSU grad living in Corvallis now, so leaving Portland after all those years has been a joy, not a loss. Oregon is rich in wood, richer than Doug fir alone, and sharing that with the rest of the world is something every Oregonian can be proud of. Wood is good.