This time was different.
The 28 Ponderosa pine and fir logs aboard the Drummond trucker's trailer marked what could be the last delivered to the Bonner mill.
At 2 p.m. Friday, Stimson cut off all deliveries in anticipation of a mid-May shutdown of its sawmill.
Stimson Vice President Jeff Webber told the 100 or so workers remaining at the plant on Tuesday that the closure is expected to last a year or more. He didn't discount the possibility that his company will never reopen the mill. The chances that someone else will buy it and operate it as a lumber operation appear remote.
Sheets, who owns DS Jr. Trucking in Drummond, said he tried to time it so his was the last load.
“We always get harassed for coming in late anyway,” he said with a laugh.
After loading the logs from a new-cut road in nearby Piltzville, Sheets stopped for lunch at the River City Grill in West Riverside. At 1:45 p.m. he headed over to the scales.
“We still didn't know if we were going to be the last ones or not,” he said.
In fact, said Scott Kuehn, there were two trucks “sort of trying to see who was going to be last. One guy, it was too muddy and he couldn't get his in.”
Kuehn, one of three procurement foresters who'll be out of a job next week, was cleaning out his office at the opposite end of Bonner as the 2 p.m. deadline approached.
He and the five other foresters met Sheets at the scales, and before the logs were unloaded, Kuehn painted on the bottom tiers words to mark the occasion.
“June 6 1886 to March 21, 2008,” he styled in bright orange. “Last load 122 years.”
“It was sort of tough,” said Kuehn, a forester for the past 30 years for Champion Timberlands, Plum Creek and now Stimson. He's researched some of the history of the mill that puts the final delivery into perspective.
“But when you start cleaning out your desk, and you start sorting through your business cards, that's when you go: This is real. This is happening,” Kuehn said.
According to “A Grass Roots Tribute: The Story of Bonner, Montana,” the first log at what was then the Hammond mill went through the saws at 10 a.m. on that June day in 1886. It was just 10 years after Custer died on the Little Big Horn, and three years before Montana became a state.
By 1937, the mill had been owned by the Anaconda Company for nearly 40 years. A story in the Daily Missoulian called it the oldest continuously operating mill in America.
There have been other shutdowns - for nine months following a fire in 1919, during the Great Depression, for an interval after Anaconda sold out to Champion International in 1973.
Until railroad access to the forests arrived in 1911, the lumber mill operated only half the year, from the time the river hogs finished their spring drive until the logs ran out, usually in late autumn.
But never before has Bonner closed down with such dim prospects of reopening. Citing the dire condition of the timber industry, Stimson revealed the closing of the last mill in another historic lumber town, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on the same day it announced Bonner's.
Stimson's plywood plant in Bonner was shut down and placed up for sale last July. At one time the two mills and Champion Timberland operations employed more than 1,000 people.
The first delivery to the Bonner mill in 1886 brought nearly 20 million board feet of logs down the Blackfoot - slightly less than half the 45 million feet that trucks and trains have been bringing to Stimson each of the past few years.
Two men from the Maine woods, Fred Thibodeau and Henry Farrell, directed the first river drive. First, with a crew of five, they rowed and poled a 46-foot bateau upstream to the logging camp 25 miles upriver.
The Farrell and Thibodeau bloodlines are still found in the Bonner today.
Sheets' older brother, Jonathan, cut Friday's load from the south toe of Bonner Mountain, where Ronald Hay is building an access road to a private cemetery behind his home.
Hay spent some 20 years working for first Anaconda, then Champion, driving a Waggoner that unloaded logs at the mill. His late father, Clarence, ran the family property in Piltzville as a certified tree farm, logging it twice and sending the produce to the Bonner mill.
Hay said he and Jonathan Sheets followed the last log delivery via radio transmission from Davy at the cut site Friday.
The Sheets brothers grew up in Clinton, where their dad drove logging truck and regular delivering loads to Bonner.
“I've been riding in trucks since I was a little kid, going into that mill,” Davy Sheets said.
Driving out Friday, for what could be the last time, wasn't easy.
“You kind of got a sick empty feeling,” he said. “Kind of like it's over.”
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Pam Strong wrote on Feb 20, 2009 9:33 PM: