Lumber Companies of Park Falls

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Lumber Companies of Park Falls .

Lumber Companies of Park Falls

I am still sorting my Park Falls information about the paper mill.

And while I have the folders open, I wondered about the sawmills.
Those disappeared before my years in town.

Here's a picture of the Waterhole spur of the Soo Line that followed the west bank of the Flambeau River.
It served the paper mill and two saw mills.
The one long track was owned and maintained by the Soo Line, and anything beyond the frogs was private track.
The year is probably 1975, and the Soo Line is off-schedule because they are dropping off cars in the daytime.
Normally back then, that was a switch job done after 10pm.
The mill's yellow GE is waiting off to the side.

The name Waterhole referred to how low it was to river level. (I drew it with a dark line on my traces below.)

There's an old sawmill building in the distance, to the left of the red Soo GP30.

Here's a simple map with letters A, B, C, and lumbering railroads 1 and 2.
And I didn't trace many side tracks.
I think A = Edward Hines Hardwood & Hemlock Co.
. . . . . B = Roddis Lumber & Veneer Co
. . . . . C = Park Falls Lumber Co.
(if I'm wrong, please let me know and I will update this page. My email address is buried in the box on my index page)
And track 2 is for Roddis and they ran for a long ways east.
So who used track 1 on my map? Going north along the west bank of the Flambeau River.
The Soo Line and Omaha are on the lower left of my map.
The Waterhole spur is the dark line from the bottom center of the map, to the sawmills by my letters A and B.
The Flambeau River is blue, and a lumber company railroad crossed it.

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Here's part of the 1939 aerial photo.
(From the aerial mapping photos from 1938 and 1939 of Wisconsin.
http://maps.sco.wisc.edu/WHAIFinder/
I marked my A, B, C; and 1 and 2 on it.
There's a lot of lumber drying piles.

Here's my picture of 1975 Park Falls on a very hazy July day.
Looking south. . . . and made from a print from a Kodak 110 size camera.
(This is from an airplane, not a kite)
I marked the A, B, C letters on it.
C is now the location of the football field of the high school.
The lumber company railroad river crossing of the Flambeau River is on the left of this picture.
The pulp wood yard occupies space that once was a sawn lumber drying yard.

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And comparing this to Google Earth pictures in 2012, several buildings have been removed since the 1970's.

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I have gone back to an old photo program to get smaller file sizes for pictures for a web page.
Some might get blurry if you zoom in a lot. But it saves space for the server and downloads very fast.
If you want the full size picture, please contact me. An e-address is in the box on my index page.

Link back to my index page, Bruce's RailRoad Pictures

my best index page is on the TrainWeb site, as of January 2011.

This page was wrote in June, 2012.

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