The Long-Bell Lumber Company sawmill at Longview, Washington was one of the largest wood products processing plants ever constructed in the Pacific Northwest. A carefully designed complex of buildings, structures, conveyors, railway lines, and docks once sprawled across 2,000 acres of low-lying land along the Columbia River. However, practically all of this massive sawmill has disappeared since the sawmill closed in 1960. All that remains today of the plant once described as the “biggest lumber mill in the world” is a large reinforced concrete structure, which is currently used as a warehouse (McClary 2008).
Robert Alexander Long, Victor Bell, and Robert White founded R.A. Long and Company at Columbus, Kansas in 1875. Long was the active partner and served as manager, clerk, accountant, and laborer until 1877, when Sam Wilson joined the business. Robert White, one of Long’s cousins, died that same year, and the company was reorganized and incorporated as the Long-Bell Lumber Company (Tweedie 2014:4). The growth and development of the Long-Bell Lumber Company during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an interesting and complex topic that has been well documented by historians of the timber industry. The purpose of this brief article is to explore the history of the humble structure that stands as the sole surviving remnant of the Long-Bell Lumber Company sawmill at Longview, Washington.
By the end of World War One, Long-Bell timber holdings were spread across hundreds of thousands of acres in Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Texas, and Wisconsin. Mind boggling amounts of finished wood products were extracted from these forests, and the rapacious depletion of these forests ultimately forced company executives to find new timber reserves elsewhere in the United States. Long-Bell purchased timber reserves in northern California and southern Oregon, and also amassed large land holdings in southwest Washington. The company also purchased rights to log 70,000 acres of timber lands in Cowlitz and Lewis counties from the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. Long-Bell executives also began planning for the construction of a sawmill to process the logs extracted from these stands of old-growth timber (McClary 2008).
Long-Bell considered locating their new sawmill in Portland or Astoria, Oregon, which both had the necessary railway and water transportation links. Ultimately, company officials selected a mill site where the Cowlitz River flowed into the Columbia River. This site was close to their timber holdings in southwest Washington, provided deep water access for oceangoing vessels on the Columbia River, and also had an existing railway connection to nearby Kelso. In 1921, Long-Bell purchased 14,000 acres of bottom lands along the Columbia River for about $2.6 million, or almost $38 million in 2021 dollars. This immense land area would not just provide the sawmill site, it would also provide the location for a purpose-built “industrial city” to shelter Long-Bell workers and their families (McClary 2008).
The Long-Bell Lumber Company sent their chief engineer Wesley Vandercook to assess their newly acquired property along the Columbia River. Vandercook set up an office in Kelso in May 1921 and led a small army of 100 men in a detailed survey of the 14,000-acre property. Most of the property was swampy and subject to periodic flooding, and Vandercook concluded that a dike would need to be constructed to reclaim the land and protect it from floods. Long-Bell issued bonds to finance the fifteen-mile-long, thirty-foot-tall dike, which was constructed for $3.25 million, or about $47.5 million in 2021 dollars (McClary 2008).
Long-Bell executive John D. Tennant was placed in charge of the construction of the sawmill, which was situated on 2,000 acres along the Columbia River waterfront. Robert Alexander Long originally intended to construct only one mill but ultimately, he decided to build two, with the East Fir mill producing green wood for overseas export and the West Fir mill churning out kiln-dried lumber for use stateside. Construction of the sawmill complex began in early 1923, and about 1,000 workers labored to complete the work on schedule so that production could begin in 1925 (McClary 2008).
Contracts were let on April 5, 1923 for the construction of the massive power plant, which would provide power not just to the sawmill complex but to the city of Longview as well (Longview Daily News 1924a). Charles C. Moore & Company, Engineers, of San Francisco, California designed and constructed the power plant. The first foundation pilings were driven on June 18, 1923, and a total of 3,044 pilings were installed to support the powerhouse and smokestacks. Over one million concrete bricks were used to construct three permanent walls of the fireproof powerhouse, which measured 296 feet long, 192 feet wide, and rose 65 feet above the ground level. The two smokestacks adjacent to the powerhouse towered 300 feet into the air and measured thirty feet across at the base and tapered to twenty-one feet across at the top. Each of these towering chimneys contained 832 cubic yards of concrete and 216,000 liner bricks and was calculated to weigh almost 4,500 tons (Longview Daily News 1924b; 1924c; 1924d; 1924e).
Ten Babcock & Wilcox water tube boilers rated at 1,200 horsepower each were initially installed to provide steam for four General Electric turbo-generators, which were each rated for 6,000 kilowatts. Four additional boilers and two additional turbo-generators could also be accommodated in the facility, which could produce up to 36 megawatts of electrical power. The Session Engineering Company of Chicago, Illinois installed the substations and electrical distribution system (Longview Daily News 1924b). “Hogged fuel,” or wood waste from the sawmill, was the primary fuel source for the boilers, though half of the boilers had oil burners installed so that steam could be produced while the operators waited for wood waste to accumulate. It was estimated that the boilers would burn 40,000 pounds of hogged fuel per hour to evaporate 10,000 gallons of water into steam (Longview Daily News 1924c).
Closeup view of the Long-Bell Lumber Company power plant, with the fuel house in the foreground. (Historic photograph, July 1924, author’s collection).
Safe storage of the hogged fuel for the boilers was an important consideration, and the Pacific Coast Engineering Company of Portland was placed in charge of designing and building the fireproof fuel house. Mechanical engineer Orville Reid managed the construction of the reinforced concrete fuel house, which measured 225 feet by 245 feet and was the largest single fuel house ever built at the time. Over one million board feet of lumber was used as formwork for the over 8,000 tons of concrete used in the construction of the fuel house, which was said to have had the largest reinforced concrete roof on the entire West Coast. Engineers with the Pacific Coast Engineering Company estimated that if the steel reinforcing bars in the building were laid end to end, they would stretch over 120 miles (Longview Daily News 1924d). A system of remotely controlled electric conveyors carried the hogged fuel from the fuel house to the powerhouse, where the fuel was fed to the boilers. A system of twelve conveyors extended across the roof of the fuel house to carry the hogged fuel to the boilers, and the structure was equipped with automatic fire sprinklers (Sanborn 1924:20).
The massive reinforced concrete fuel house is shown on the 1924 Sanborn fire insurance map for the Long-Bell sawmill complex. The fuel house is the brown colored box to the left of the power house in blue to the right. (Sanborn Map Company, September 1924, Longview, Cowlitz County, Washington, Sheet 20, from the collections of the Library of Congress).
The power plant was placed in service on June 18, 1924, and the sawmill began production in 1925 (Longview Daily News 1924c; McClary 2008). Unfortunately, not long after the massive sawmill opened, the Long-Bell Lumber Company began to suffer financial problems due to a softening in the lumber market in the late 1920s. The onset of the Great Depression following the stock market crash of October 1929 hit both Long-Bell and Longview hard. Long-Bell was in dire financial straits and were forced to sell the power plant to Washington Gas and Electric Company in 1932. The company filed for bankruptcy and reorganized in 1935. Long-Bell survived the Great Depression, and World War Two dramatically increased the demand for wood products, which helped Long-Bell recover financially. However, another slump in the lumber market in the early 1950s and the depletion of the company’s reserves of old-growth fir and cedar sealed the fate of the company. International Paper purchased the Long-Bell Lumber Company in 1956, and the sawmills in Longview closed in 1960. Many of the old timber storage sheds were used by the Port of Longview as warehouses until they were dismantled in 1996 (McClary 2008).
Epilogue
I recently acquired an old photograph of the Long-Bell Lumber Company sawmill complex. This photograph was taken in July 1924, not long after the power plant began operating and the West Fir mill was still under construction. The power plant is clearly shown in the image, and the distinctive form of the massive fuel house adjacent to the powerhouse is hard to miss.
“Birds eye view of the Long-Bell lumber manufacturing plant. At the right can be seen the huge electric power plant with its two stacks each 300 feet high. In the rear of the power plant is a portion of the cutting pond which covers an area of 25 acres. The broad flat-topped structure in front of the power plant is the fuel house. The white buildings beyond the power plant are the head mill and resaw [sic] mill and sorter sheds. Extending over many acres in the rear are the dry kilns, cooling sheds, dry lumber storage and dry lumber sorter sheds, planing [sic] mill and loading sheds. On the Columbia river are lumber export docks with rail timber docks between them and the mill.” (Historic photograph, July 1924, author’s collection).
The sheer enormity of the Long-Bell sawmill complex is best illustrated in an aerial photograph taken by the United States Geological Survey in 1951, which shows the centrally located power plant flanked by the West Fir and East Fir mills. The fuel house is marked with the red box in the aerial photograph. An aerial photograph from the present day illustrates how the fuel house is the sole surviving remnant of the Long-Bell sawmill complex. The stout construction of the fuel house is likely the primary reason why it has survived as long as it has. Unfortunately, this historic remnant will soon disappear, erasing the last trace of what was once touted as the “biggest lumber mill in the world.”
Aerial photograph of the Long-Bell Lumber Company sawmill at Longview, Cowlitz County, Washington. The fuel house is marked with the red box. (United States Geological Survey, October 25, 1951, Entity ID 1QP0000030034, USGS Earth Explorer online).
Present-day aerial photograph of the Long-Bell Lumber Company power plant fuel house, which is the rectangular structure to the left of the red pin (Google Maps).
WORKS CITED
Longview Daily News. Electronic resource, https://www.newspapers.com/, accessed March 1, 2021.
1924a “Day by Day in The Building of a City; Year’s Events In Chronological Form.” Longview Daily News, 25 February:21.
1924b “New Mark Reached in Long-Bell History.” Longview Daily News, 31 July:13.
1924c “Building of Powerhouse is Industrial Achievement and Engineering Triumph.” Longview Daily News, 31 July:16.
1924d “Fuel House is Largest Built.” Longview Daily News, 31 July:16.
1924e “Concrete Facts.” Longview Daily News, 31 July:41.
McClary, D.
2008 Longview – Thumbnail History. Electronic resource, https://www.historylink.org/File/8560, accessed March 1, 2021.
Sanborn Map Company (Sanborn)
1924 Longview, Cowlitz County, Washington, September, Sheet 20. Electronic resource, https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps, accessed March 1, 2021.
Tweedie, J.
2014 The Long-Bell Story. Param’s Press, Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
United States Geological Survey (USGS)
2021 EarthExplorer. Electronic resource, https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/, accessed March 1, 2021.
Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation (DAHP)
2021 WISAARD, Property ID 723694. Electronic resource, https://wisaard.dahp.wa.gov/Map, accessed March 1, 2021.