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.
History
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 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 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.
By 1883 the difficulties of using horses and oxen for moving logs to the river pool encouraged building railroads to reduce the friction of skidding logs. Railway branches were built to reach trees and then dismantled after those logs had been moved to Big River. Total length of track was never more than . Teams of working animals pulled the logs on flatcars until 1901. The railroad was rebuilt after extensive flood damage in 1904. Union Lumber Company purchased the Mendocino Lumber Company sawmill, railroad, and timberlands in 1906; and again rebuilt the railroad after flood damage in 1907. The buildings of Boyle's logging camp were moved on railway cars when the camp was moved upstream from the Big River confluence with Laguna Creek to the Little North Fork Big River in 1912. The Laguna Creek branch line trestle across Big River was replaced by a Howe truss bridge in the winter of 1919-1920. The sawmill operated until 1931 when Union Lumber Company's Fort Bragg sawmill was able to meet lumber demands decreased by the Great Depression. The railroad was dismantled during 1936 and 1937 when Japanese preparations for World War II raised the value of scrap iron. The sawmill was briefly reopened in 1938 to mill Douglas fir logs salvaged when a log raft from Oregon broke up off the coast of Mendocino.
Dinky
Locomotive number 1 arrived in July 1901 to improve overland transport of logs from the remaining forests to the pool five miles upstream of the sawmill. It was Baldwin Locomotive Works 0-4-2 tank locomotive #5353 built in 1880 to pull unpowered street cars around Golden Gate Park. This steam dummy weighed 20 tons with a full-length cab covering the boiler to resemble the street cars it pulled. After replacing the teams on 18 August 1900, the cab length was gradually reduced repairing damage from various woods mishaps over the years until it resembled conventional locomotives. As more capable locomotives arrived to share the load, the first locomotive came to be known as the Dinky. Dinky disappeared when the fourth locomotive arrived about 1923, but its disposal is undocumented.