A Different Kind of Company Town

The old Sandy Lumber Co. (of Brightwood) was started in about the early teen years. It was located on Sleepy Hollow Road near the Marmot Bridge over the Sandy River.

“We knew all our neighbors and they became lifetime friends,” said Thelma Winters Buswell describing her early years as a young girl where her family lived in the Sandy Lumber Co. complex, a company town that employed about 50 men in the late teens and early 1920s. Thelma’s father, Bill Winters, was the mill’s sawyer, an important position that required extensive experience.

The name “company town” has a bad connotation of a firm that takes advantage of its employees by requiring them to rent company housing and buy from a company store. Well, the Sandy Lumber Co. (of Brightwood) was different!

They provided free lumber to workers to build their own houses, a free water supply and free wood to fuel their stoves. The rough-lumber houses were crude but the workers were grateful to have them and for their camaraderie with their neighbors. The complex contained the sawmill, cook-house, the worker’s homes, a grade school, a small confectionery with pool and card tables, and a few convenience items for the workers. There was a barber chair available and a set of scissors and clippers for anyone who knew how to cut hair. Old-timers used to joke that former sheep-shearers gave the best haircuts!

“We lived next door to the Brightwood School building that still stands,” said Thelma who is now into her 90s. “Charley Bailey, the old fiddle player, lived on one side of our house with his three children. Maudie, one of them, later became the Postmaster at Brightwood. I remember John and Winnie McIntyre who had a combination store and small hotel on Salmon River. Winnie used to tie two large containers on her horse and head for the huckleberry patches on Zigzag Mountain in the late summer. The berries sold rapidly at their store.”It became a close community with the school as the community center. They held pie and basket socials, card parties, and held many school events. It was only a short walk up to the dance hall at Brightwood to enjoy fiddlers Charlie Bailey and Pete Stone.

The workers humorously nicknamed the mill “haywire.” In the early years the mill mainly cut railroad ties that were floated in a flume part of the way to the railroad at Bull Run. As trucks began to replace horse-drawn wagons and gravel roads replaced the wood planks, the mill then produced conventional lumber through the 1920s and into the 30s.

Though the families gradually became scattered, the bonding that occurred during the hard times caused them to keep in touch during their lifetimes. They were a unique group, these families named Pickens, Odell, Winters, Mikkelson, Nelson, Sladky, Stone, Edwards, Cox, King, Will, Dodd, and so many others whose names we can’t recall.

You can see a group picture of all the workers at our Sandy Historical Society Museum. --Taken from Hometown Sandy Oregon: 36 Short Stories by Phil Jonsrud, copyright 2011 by Sandy Historical Society, pp.46-47