For Sale: Lumber Town, History
The people of this wind-blown lumber town could see their whole world change hands.
Louisiana-Pacific Corp., the building products company, is putting the entire community up for sale, including a pulp mill, a wood-chipping plant, an empty sawmill and about 90 weather-beaten pastel cottages, most of which are rented to employees.
“It’s on the block, so I’m on the block,” says Lori Harnden, an accounting clerk who has worked for the company for a year. She is among about 500 employees in Samoa--from millworkers to administrators--in danger of losing their jobs and the town that many of them call home.
There’s not much to the town along Humboldt Bay, about 230 miles up the coast from San Francisco. Samoa has no mayor. There are no stores, not even a gas station. There’s the Peninsula Elementary School, a small post office and a fire department.
The busiest place in town is probably the Samoa Cookhouse. Leased by Louisiana-Pacific to its operators, the restaurant has been serving meat-and-potato meals--now more to tourists than to townspeople--for nearly a century.
Mary Miller, whose father was a lumberman, has been a cook at the restaurant for 16 of those years, since she graduated from high school.
“I wanted to stay here for the rest of my life,” says Miller, who’s considering going back to school to become a paralegal, regardless of the outcome of the sale.
Some don’t think being on the auction block will mean great change for the town, which has already changed hands twice. Hammond Lumber operated Samoa through the Depression and World War II, selling it to Georgia-Pacific, which sold it to its spinoff company, Louisiana-Pacific, in 1973.
Louisiana-Pacific, based in Portland, Ore., is now selling 300,000 California acres and three sawmills along with Samoa.
“The company is pretty much divesting most of its California assets,” says Bill Windes, a Louisiana-Pacific spokesman in Samoa.
The asking price for all the California properties, which affect 1,100 employees in all, is about $800 million.
Rumors of a sale had been circulating for a couple of years, especially since the pulp mill has been operating in the red. This year, it’s expected to make a profit for the first time in years.
When the news hit a few weeks ago, some people panicked and talked about leaving town. But things have settled down, as employees sit and wait, perhaps for months. They say they won’t get severance packages--two weeks’ pay for every year of employment--if they leave early.
Harnden, the accounting clerk, says she will rely on her second job as a grocery cashier.
“In this county, as long as I’ve lived here, you got to be a jack of all trades,” says Harnden, who often works from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. at her two jobs. “It’s a tough place to live.”
Others say they, too, will tough it out.
“I’ll just take what I have in pension and flip burgers at McDonald’s,” says Lee Mason, a pulp mill supervisor.
Losing Louisiana-Pacific also means no more company picnics or charity firewood sales to raise money for the high school band, Boy Scouts and students from Humboldt State University in nearby Arcata.
But Mason says that, for the most part, the community spirit in Samoa died years ago as the stores and gas station shut down and the company started renting houses to nonemployees.
“It used to be tightknit,” he says. “Now it’s a business running houses. That’s all it is.”
Many lumber mills shut down in the late 1980s and early ‘90s after the federal government restricted logging in the ancient forests of the Northwest to protect the Northern spotted owl. Meanwhile, Canadian timber imports to the U.S. have increased from 20% of the nation’s timber 20 years ago to as much as 40%.
Windes, the company spokesman, says he can count at least 15 Northern California towns that have shrunk to a few stores, a restaurant and maybe a filling station in the last decade. That includes Covelo, where he used to live.
“When the timber sales dried up, the mill dried up,” Windes says. “And there went the town.”
Even the company spokesman may lose his job if Samoa is sold.
“I go home every night and my wife and I sit down and talk about it,” says Windes, a forester by trade who has been in the business for more than 30 years and bought a house in Eureka just two years ago. “Right now, that’s just about all we can do.”
