Mendocino Lumber Company
| Locale | Mendocino County, California |
|---|---|
| Dates of operation | 1883–1931 |
| Track gauge | 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge |
| Length | 9 miles (14 km) |
| Headquarters | Mendocino, California |
Mendocino Lumber Company operated a sawmill on Big River near the town of Mendocino, California. The sawmill began operation in 1853 as the Redwood Lumber Manufacturing Company, and changed ownership several times before cutting its final logs in 1938. The sawmill site became part of the Big River Unit of Mendocino Headlands State Park where a few features of the mill and its associated forest railway are still visible along the longest undeveloped estuary in northern California.
California Gold Rush entrepreneur Henry Meiggs owned one of California's first sawmills near Bodega. After that sawmill had converted nearby forests to lumber for the booming city of San Francisco, Meiggs investigated reports of coastal forests to the north and shipped a boiler and steam-powered gang sawmill around Cape Horn to be erected on the navigable Big River estuary. After ordering the machinery from eastern manufacturers, E.C. Williams took a shortcut across the isthmus of Panama in the spring of 1852 to survey the Big River in advance of machinery delivery aboard the brig Ontario. The sawmill was completed in the spring of 1853, and produced 50,000 board foot of lumber per day. It was comparatively easy to float logs to the sawmill from trees cut along the shoreline of the estuary, and ships carried the lumber to San Francisco.
Log storage was about 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) upstream of the sawmill to prevent Pacific surf from breaking containment booms and allowing the river to carry the log inventory out to sea. When the original gang sawmill proved too small for the old-growth Sequoia sempervirens logs, a larger sawmill was built near the boom, but lumber drying and storage for shipment continued on the bluff adjacent to the river mouth. An even larger sawmill was built on the flat near the boom after a fire in 1861. Moving logs to the sawmill became more difficult after the closest trees had been cut. Logs were moved to a natural river pool about 5 miles (8.0 km) upstream of the sawmill, but only during winter storms was river flow adequate to move those logs downstream to the mill. Several dozen dams were built on Big River tributaries upstream of the pool to impound water for sudden release to float log downstream during other seasons. By 1873, the name had changed to Mendocino Lumber Company and the mill was the most important in Mendocino County.
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