BG279: Abandoned House & Car at (Now Gone) Mill Town of Bradwood, OR – April 1981.

Before the Restoration:

This restoration shows an abandoned residence & car, one of the last buildings that remained standing in the once-thriving company town of Bradwood, Oregon as seen in April 1981.

The town was the company town of the Bradley-Woodward Lumber Company, and was incorporated in July 1930. It’s name was a derivative of the company name. Shortly after the mill began operations, work began on creating the town.

Bradwood was a location on the Columbia River situated between the towns of Knappa & Wauna, Oregon, about 22 miles east of Astoria.

With a shipping port and served by the SP&S railroad, Bradwood became the terminus for the company’s private railroad bringing down logs felled on Nicolai Mountain, milling them at the company mill & shipping finished products out by ship & rail. Lumber from the mill was used to construct the houses & businesses that were built to accommodate the millworkers & their families.

The mill and town thrived during the depression years and throughout World War II but afterward the once abundant timber stands dwindled and the mill ceased operations of it’s privately owned logging railroad. The mill continued on in operations with logs brought in by trucks & purchased log rafts for awhile. At some point, the entire operation was sold to Pope & Talbot Co.

In June 1962 the decision was made to close down the mill and a year later, on June 25th, 1963 the mill & entire town was sold at auction into private hands. Some of the buildings were moved or deconstructed but the rest were simply abandoned.

A major fire in 1965 destroyed the mill & much of the remaining buildings, and another fire in 1984 took care of what buildings remained including the house pictured here.

Today, the property is privately held, no structures or roads remain, and there is no evidence that the little community of Bradwood ever existed. In the mid-2000s, the site was considered for a proposed terminal for receiving liquefied natural gas (LNG). Protests & bankruptcies however derailed that plan and today the site is unimproved with posted “No Trespassing” signs.

BG278: Abandoned General Store at now gone Bradwood, Oregon – April 1981.

Before the Restoration:

This restoration shows the Bradwood Store, one of the last buildings that remained standing in the once-thriving company town of Bradwood, Oregon as seen in April 1981.

The town was the company town of the Bradley-Woodward Lumber Company, incorporated in July 1930. It’s name was a derivative of the company name. Shortly after the mill began operations, work began on creating the town.

Bradwood was a location on the Columbia River situated between the towns of Knappa & Wauna, Oregon, about 22 miles east of Astoria.

With a shipping port and served by the SP&S railroad, Bradwood became the terminus for the company’s private railroad bringing down logs felled on Nicolai Mountain, milling them at the company mill & shipping finished products out by ship & rail. Lumber from the mill was used to construct the houses & businesses that were built to accommodate the millworkers & their families.

The mill and town thrived during the depression years and throughout World War II but afterward the once abundant timber stands dwindled and the mill ceased operations of it’s privately owned railroad. The mill continued on in operations with logs brought in by trucks & purchased log rafts for awhile. At some point, the operation was sold to Pope & Talbot Co.

In June 1962 a decision was made to close down the mill and a year later, on June 25th, 1963 the mill & entire town was sold at auction into private hands. Some of the buildings were moved or deconstructed but the rest were abandoned.

A major fire in 1965 destroyed the mill & much of the remaining buildings, and another fire in 1984 took care of what buildings remained including the Bradwood Store.

Today, the property is privately held, no structures or roads remain, and there is no evidence that the little town of Bradwood ever existed. In the mid-2000s, the site was considered for a proposed terminal for receiving liquefied natural gas (LNG). Protests & bankruptcies however derailed that plan and today the site is unimproved with posted “No Trespassing” signs.

GT004: Abandoned Freight Wagon at Ghost Town of Bodie, CA – August 1959.

Before the Restoration:

In this restoration, a long abandoned freight wagon stands silently where it was left after it’s last use in the gold-mining boomtown, now ghost town of Bodie, California in this view from August, 1959.

Bodie came into being when a small group of prospectors discovered gold in the hills above the town in 1859. The prospector the town was named after, W.S. Bodey, died in a blizzard the following year never seeing the emergence of the town that would be named for him.

In 1876, the Standard Company discovered a profitable deposit of gold-bearing ore, which transformed Bodie from an isolated mining camp comprising a few prospectors and company employees to a Wild West boomtown. By 1879, Bodie had a population of approximately 5,000–7,000 people and rode it’s boomtown status into the late 1880’s. Gold bullion from the town’s nine stamp mills was shipped to Carson City, Nevada, by way of Aurora, Wellington and Gardnerville. Most shipments were accompanied by armed guards and after the bullion reached Carson City, it was delivered to the mint there, or sent by rail to the mint in San Francisco.

In it’s heyday, Bodie had the amenities of larger towns, including a Wells Fargo Bank, four volunteer fire companies, a brass band, railroad, miners’ and mechanics’ union, several daily newspapers, and a jail. At its peak, 65 saloons lined Main Street, which was a mile long. Murders, shootouts, barroom brawls, and stagecoach holdups were regular occurrences.

The first signs of decline appeared in 1880 and became obvious toward the end of the year. Promising mining booms in Butte, Montana; Tombstone, Arizona; and Utah lured men away from Bodie. The get-rich-quick, single miners who came to the town in the 1870s moved on to these other booms, and Bodie developed into a family-oriented community.

In 1882 residents built the Methodist Church (which still stands, left center of photo) and the Roman Catholic Church (burned in 1932). Despite the population decline, the mines were flourishing, and in 1881, Bodie’s ore production was recorded at a high of $3.1 million. Also in 1881, a narrow-gauge railroad was built called the Bodie Railway & Lumber Company, bringing lumber, cordwood, and mine timbers to the mining district from Mono Mills south of Mono Lake.

A devastating fire in 1892 destroyed a large section of the town core. Though the mining still continued to prosper, the population had significantly declined further & the town continued to mirror that through the early 19 teens. The towns last newspaper ceased production in 1912, the Standard Consolidated Mill (center-middle in the photo) closed in 1913 & in 1917, the railway was abandoned & tracks taken up. Though families still resided in town, & several mills still operated, Bodie was declared a “ghost town” in 1915. Despite this designation & a subsequent fire in town in 1932, Bodie still maintained a post office & mill until 1942 when the last mill closed & the town was essentially deserted.

James Cain, President of Southern Consolidated Mining Co., started purchasing the bank, lots, buildings & most of the available property around town during the early 1900 decline, believing the town would experience a resurgence. The town never saw that resurgence & after the 1932 fire & further decline, Cain began hiring some of the last residents as caretakers to protect and maintain the remaining buildings.

In 1961, the town of Bodie was placed on the National Historic Register and in 1962, the State of California purchased the land & buildings from the Cain family and has maintained it as California’s Smallest State Historical Park and in a state or “arrested decay,” meaning that the existing buildings will be maintained as they were but with no improvements.

Visitors to Bodie can visit the buildings and see how they were left when the last residents left over a half century ago. It is considered the best existing example of a frontier mining town today.

BG250: Centennial (Crown) Mill and Rail Spurs in Portland, OR – Oct. 1992.

This restored image from the negative shows railcars staged for loading flour on Tracks 1 & 2 at Centennial (Crown) Mills in Portland, Oregon in October 1992, a much different view from today.

Crown Mills was built in 1910 by Balfour-Guthrie and Company, a San Francisco-based American branch of a large shipping and investment company based in Liverpool, England which had extensive investments in the eastern Oregon and Washington wheat trade.

Barely a year after it opened, the flour mill was seriously damaged by a fire. The upper floors of the building—out of the reach of Portland’s fireboat and beyond the capacity of its under-pressured sprinkler system—were gutted. But the building survived and was quickly rebuilt, with a huge wood-stave (later steel) water tank atop the roof to help protect it. The water tank and the Crown Flour sign in ten-foot tall letters on the roof were well-known features on the waterfront. By the end of World War I, Crown Mills employed between 110 and 120 workers and operated around the clock. In 1928, the company built a smaller mill next to the flour mill to produce animal feed and added grain elevators.

In the late 1940’s, Balfour-Guthrie sold the mill to one of the largest milling operations in the West, Centennial Flouring Mills of Tacoma, Washington. Centennial improved the facility with new equipment and facilities in 1962. A series of corporate restructurings ended in 1981, when Archer-Daniels Midland purchased the Portland mill. However, outdated machinery & weakened structures in the plant required major upgrades to remain competitive, and ADM made the business decision to cease all production in 1997 and close the mill.

The Portland Development Commission purchased the Centennial Mills property in 2000, and Warehouse E (seen in this photo) was remodeled and re-purposed for the Portland Mounted Police. Most of the remaining buildings were deemed too deteriorated to repair or remodel and were demolished in 2015-16. The original concrete flour mill still stands pending renovation or sale.

In the distance is the renovated Albers Milling building, now various business offices & in between Albers & Centennial Mills is the sign & parking lot for the now-gone RIVER QUEEN floating restaurant, which is now the location of the Waterfront Pearl Condominiums. To the right of the photo is the former railcar storage yard of the Portland Terminal Railroad & Union Station.

BL001: Sagging Moore Mill Lumber Co. Bldg in Bandon, OR – April 2000.

This restoration shows the old, abandoned (& now gone) Moore Mill Lumber Co. Truck Shop building on the waterfront at Bandon, Oregon as seen from the boardwalk in April 2000.

The building was built in late 1917 after Giebisch & Joplin Condensed Milk Co., of Portland came to city leaders to propose a new condensery for their operation which was quickly approved. The design & plan was to employ 50-60 people, & have a projected output of about 1000 cases of evaporated milk per day.

For all the enthusiasm of the town toward Giebisch & Joplin however, it was not returned by the company as two years later they sold the building to Nestle’s Food Company. Nestles expended more improvements into the building, adding new machinery, boilers & concrete floors & expanding the manufacturing capacity to almost 2500 cases daily.

Though Nestle had it’s best year in 1922, the cost of shipping & supplies from & to San Francisco and ongoing opposition from the Oregon Dairymen’s Coop eventually proved to be too much & the company ceased operations in October 1925.

Several years later, the building was sold to Jack Dalen, owner of Bandon Cedar Manufacturing Co. who used the building into the 1930’s until it was bought out and the business moved.

The building sat vacant for awhile and was one of the few buildings in town that survived a disastrous fire in late September, 1936.  Moore Mill Lumber Co., also a survivor, and at that time the largest employer in Bandon, acquired the building and used it to store truck parts.

In 1945, Moore Mill’s ownership changed hands & the new management utilized the building as a truck shop making repairs to log & fire trucks.

Despite another fire in 1987 that destroyed most of the mill’s other buildings, the truck shop again survived but was deteriorating badly. Pilings underneath the building were rotting and parts of the building began sagging.

In 1997, the mill built a new truck shop & the building was vacated and sold to the City of Bandon for $1.

The city had hopes of renovating & developing the property, but the condition of the pilings plus further damage to the building by storms ultimately led city leaders to abandon those ideas. Plans shifted to demolishing the old building but again the city was thwarted when it was discovered that the structure was painted with lead-based paint. The Dept. of Environmental Quality advised the city that the affected parts of the building would have to be disposed of in a lined land fill, a process the city could not afford.

A solution to the city’s dilemma came in early 2001 when TimberCreek Inc. of Ketchum, Idaho, who had previously dismantled a building in Astoria, acquired the salvage rights to the building from the city in exchange for completely removing the dilapidated building.

The dismantling of the stubborn building was completed in August 2001.

LS475: Crystal Mill (Lost Horse Mill) Powerhouse, near Crystal, CO – Oct. 1991.

This restoration from October 1991, shows the long abandoned powerhouse of the Sheep Mountain Tunnel & Mining Co. that was located on the Crystal River near Crystal, CO.

This powerhouse, containing the compressor house, gear house & penstock, was built in 1892 to generate power to run equipment for mining in the Sheep Mountain Tunnel & other mines.

A turbine water wheel which generated over 90 horsepower was the propelling force which operated the compressor. The compressed air was then carried through pipe lines to air drills.

The power to run the machinery was acquired by damming the Crystal River near the entrance to the Sheep Mountain Tunnel at the confluence of the north and south forks of the Crystal river.

Mining operations ceased in 1917 and the water wheel and all the mill machinery are no longer present.

The dam system which once diverted water from the river to drive the mill machinery also has not survived.  The broken boards & debris to the right of the building are what’s left of the company’s stamp mill, used to process the ore.

The powerhouse still survives thanks to restoration work started in the 1970s & 1980s and was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 5, 1985.