Photos by David Ledger and Brigitte Robertson
The SEA field trip to the Phillips Brothers Mill was a fascinating and informative tour led by family member Greg Hendrix, the current family patriarch who has been working at the mill since he was 10 years old. He started the tour with a look at an old steam-driven tractor built in about 1910 as we waited for a late arrival.
From here he took us to the logging pond and the sawmill where the initial cuts of logs are made and explained every intricate detail of the process including the loading of logs to be ready to cut to how the logs are further cut as the boards go to the next step where they are cut into smaller lengths, all on the same track. This section is run by steam from a huge boiler and numerous belts on rollers are engaged and disengaged throughout cutting to special sizes.
Before going to the box factory, he answered many questions such as:
How do you select the trees to cut? They cut the dead and dying trees interspersed in their forest, leaving room for nearby trees to increase in size and small saplings to grow.
Who do you sell your lumber to? Most is sold as custom wood, with one builder from Lake Tahoe who likes the rough-cut lumber for expensive homes. For others, it’s custom orders including specialty boxes, with a brand name usually burned into the wood.
At times they have trouble keeping up with orders, other times such as winter it is slow. The price of wood is very low now due to all the wood on the market from salvage logging, but as their work is custom orders, they still keep busy.
They have the box factory on a steam furnace for power, but with small orders, machinery is driven by electricity from generators or solar power. The entire property is off the grid with solar power and battery backup powering the family home.
Because Greg has worked on the mill since he was 10 years old, he has a tremendous amount of knowledge about the mill and just as important, keeping their land producing wood without clearcutting, preserving it for the next seven generations.
