Sixty-seven years ago, when Allyn Ford's father opened his first sawmill in Roseburg, he found a straightforward way to make money: A grinding, steel maw chewed through locally cut trees, spitting out millions of board feet of lumber annually.
Those days are long gone. Today, trees from nearby state and federal forests are nearly as scarce as spotted owls.
Now, Ford's family-owned Roseburg Forest Products is betting its future on high-tech home-building materials and tight relationships with customers. Trouble is, Ford's competitors in South America, Canada and Asia are all vying for the same markets.
"We'd better be good," says Ford, an affable man with a Stanford University M.B.A. who admits to healthy revenues but elusive earnings. "We're competing with everyone in the world."
Similar stories echo through Timber Country, which stretches along the western face of the Cascades, curls west around Eugene and brushes the Coast Range. Survival of the fittest applies equally to the flora and fauna of the Elliott State Forest's mist-filled hills and the struggling mill towns of Oakridge, Mill City and Sweet Home.
Most of the trees in Timber Country belong to the federal government. During the past decade, in response to environmental regulations and lawsuits, the feds have drastically scaled back logging, dragging down harvests to record lows in 2001. Since 1989, about 160 mills statewide have closed, taking with them 35,000 jobs.
While regions such as Southern Oregon, Central Oregon and the Columbia Corridor have rallied around new industries, new residents and new identities, Timber Country has struggled, with limited success, to right itself.
The bigger towns, especially those along Interstate 5, are slowly diversifying. But they're still counting on timber companies to fortify the region. Many smaller towns, which lost their livelihoods along with the logs, are trying to turn to tourists, commuters and retirees.
The industry that once ruled Oregon's economy, politics and identity watched as Portland's 1990s boom made high-tech king. It was a financial and psychological blow that has deepened tensions in the region and made the politics of Timber Country increasingly conservative, defensive and angry.
At best, the mood in these blue-collar towns is skittish.
"Everyone's feeling insecure," says Randy Fouts, who drove a forklift for Roseburg Forest Products for 30 years before becoming a business agent for Lumber and Sawmill Workers Local 2949. "They don't know what the future holds."
Gap in wages doubles
Despite the industry's decline, Oregon remains the largest softwood producer in the country.
Wood products workers account for 15 percent of the state's manufacturing employment, compared with 20 percent in high-tech. Timber companies and their executives contribute heavily to political campaigns and maintain a powerful lobby in Salem and Washington, D.C.
The industry's resilience has forced state leaders to question economic development policies that have favored high-tech over timber. Gov. Ted Kulongoski, for instance, has signed legislation making it easier to redevelop abandoned mill sites.
And it has kept the pressure on lawmakers to balance environmental, recreational and logging interests. Last legislative session, the industry pushed a bill to increase logging on some state forests, but it died after heated debate.
Still, with most of Timber Country's forests in federal hands, state influence is limited.
"I don't think Ted can do much good," Fouts says.
Amid the clash of interests, timber companies are finding ways to survive. Roseburg Forest Products bought up private timberland, branched into a wide array of lumber products and modernized operations.
Instead of selling off its mills, as others have done, it has been investing in new ones. The latest is a highly automated $75 million building products plant. Unlike its forerunners, which turned big logs into millions of two-by-fours, the plant assembles composite materials into sturdy, easy-to-use joists, beams and columns for homes and other structures.
The operation sprawls across 70 acres. A single building encloses 11 acres and contains such proprietary equipment that managers won't talk about details.
"We've decided to go big and fast," says Ford, who continues to pump millions of dollars into capital improvements.
With annual sales of about $800 million and a work force of about 3,000, Roseburg Forest Products is one of the state's largest privately held companies. For decades, it has been Roseburg's biggest employer.
Even so, the company hasn't turned a profit in the past two years. And this summer, it announced layoffs in its plywood unit, including the closure of a plant in Green on the outskirts of Roseburg.
The layoffs will leave more than 600 people -- 20 percent of the work force -- without jobs. They shocked a community still raw from a decade-long slump.
"It wasn't a pleasant decision," Ford says. "We're part of the community, and we feel it."
Judy Sherman, 60, a short, strong-looking woman with graying hair and rugged hands, learned of the layoffs -- including hers -- while buying bread in a downtown bakery.
"All kinds of things ran through my mind -- what bills hadn't I paid, how long would the money last," says Sherman, who had worked for timber companies for 30 years, the last eight in one of Roseburg Forest Products' plywood mills.
Sherman, who is single and cares for two young children and a grown grandson and granddaughter, can't afford to retire. She also doesn't expect to get her old job back. "Everything is so downsized and mechanized," she says. "We knew it was just a matter of time before our jobs were gone for good."
Other jobs, such as those with Dell Computer's new call center in Roseburg, have helped offset declines in timber employment. But service-oriented jobs generally are lower-paying and can be ill-suited to mill workers' skills.
From 1990 to 2000, the gap between the county's average wage and Oregon's more than doubled to $3,688. The divide between county and national average wages: $7,604.
Sherman hopes to go back to school, using money from a federal aid program for dislocated workers, to earn a degree in early childhood education.
She says she should have changed her career years ago. Even so, she doesn't understand why federal policies have come down so hard on harvest levels.
"There's no reason or rhyme why they can't harvest and replant and harvest," she says.
Looking for income, federal help
When Paul Ehinger, 80, worked for Edward Hines Lumber in Westfir, the company ran a sawmill, a plywood mill and a logging operation, dominating the bustling town east of Eugene.
Today, the company's office is a bed-and-breakfast.
Runaway costs shut down Westfir's timber operation by the early 1980s. The town where Ehinger raised his family has dwindled to 307 people and three businesses: the bed-and-breakfast, a U.S. post office and a massage therapist.
The most vulnerable mills lay in small towns like Westfir -- next to, or within, federal forests and heavily dependent on publicly owned trees. Boring, Estacada, Lyons, Idanha, Sweet Home, Oakridge, Dillard, Drain, Creswell, all suffered mill closures. Like Westfir, many have found little to fill the void.
"The ones in the center of government forests have pretty much disappeared over the horizon," says Ehinger, now a private timber consultant in Eugene.
State employment economists say almost half of the timber workers who lost their jobs in the 1990s fell off employment rolls for good. They moved to other states or retired or became part of "a cadre of chronically underemployed rural residents," labor expert Art Ayre wrote in a June article in the Journal of Forestry.
When harvests in Oregon peaked in 1986 at 8.7 billion board feet, 56 percent of the logs came from federal lands. At the low in 2001, the share had plummeted to 5 percent.
The hardships have laced communities with bitterness and a sense of betrayal. Politics are more polarized and conservative, Ehinger and others say.
"We're Republican-based but labor-friendly. That's a tough mix," says Fouts, the union leader. "Add environmental issues, and that's really a problem."
Many blame the federal government for shoddy forest management. They blame environmentalists for extremist tactics in the courts and in the forests. They blame Portland for forgetting its roots and fostering liberal attitudes unsympathetic to Timber Country's problems.
"I'm not saying they're ignorant. They just don't understand," Fouts says.
Republican state Rep. Susan Morgan has lived for 25 years in Myrtle Creek, a onetime timber town south of Roseburg. She's looking to Congress to increase federal timber harvests -- not to the levels of the past, but substantially above those of today.
The forest fires that have raged through the West in recent years have fueled the Bush administration's efforts to thin more trees and increase harvests. After Bush visited Oregon this summer to promote his cause, Timber Country residents began talking more optimistically about federal policies easing.
"There's hope here that we can regain some of the losses," Morgan says. "There has to be some kind of rational approach to managing the federal forests."
Counties also are lobbying for the continuation of their timber subsidies, put in place in 2001 and due to expire in 2006.
Yet analyst Ehinger remains cautious. "Honestly," he says, "I don't see the environmental movement turning over and playing dead in the sand."
Timber Country tries to diversify
Like many towns, Oakridge isn't banking on timber's return.
In the mid-1990s, the city bought the abandoned Bald Knob sawmill at the edge of town, eager to tear it down and forget about the past.
But the community, which lies in the lush Willamette National Forest southeast of Eugene, hasn't been able to lure a new manufacturing tenant to the site. So the mill gathers rust, its pale green sides ripped and ragged, its rafters dripping rain.
"The pigeons rent it," says Jay Bennett, a former city administrator.
Government money helped Oakridge buy the 220-acre site, which the town plans to turn into a campuslike industrial park. Some of the work is done, and a few small businesses have moved in.
Bryan Huber, chief executive of Creative Composites, came to Oakridge to build high-end snowboards, but he ended up manufacturing aircraft parts for the U.S. Air Force, a more lucrative niche. With annual sales approaching $1 million and employment growing, he plans to expand the business into an available building at the industrial park.
Huber is a sailor, as well as a snowboarder and businessman. He says Oakridge, resting in a tight valley pocket within the forest, is the perfect spot to play and make money. Highway 58 brings travelers to nearby rivers, lakes and the Willamette Pass ski area.
Randy Dreiling, chamber of commerce president and owner of Oregon-adventures.com, is convinced the town can become a destination for mountain bikers, rivaling hot spots like Bend in Deschutes County.
Dreiling tried to get traction for his business back in the early 1990s. But the mill had recently closed, and laid-off timber workers were in no mood for the peddlings of forest-loving mountain bikers.
" 'Tree-hugger' was the politest thing they called us," Dreiling recalls.
Now, many of the timber families are gone. And the townspeople who remain seem more receptive to new ventures, Dreiling says. Early this year, he moved to Oakridge from Eugene, set up a Web site and began organizing mountain-bike tours.
With 500 miles of trails winding through the surrounding forests, "the atmosphere up here is great for biking," he says. "It's just a matter of time."
-- Gail Kinsey Hill
