By Tom Morphet
Workers at 4 Mile Lutak Road are dismantling the former Schnabel Lumber
Co. sawmill, pulling down the most prominent vestige of the glory days of the local timber
industry.
The mill was once the town’s biggest employer, providing as many
as 160 jobs, filling a freight ship monthly and – in later years –
intermittently supplying the community’s electric power.
Owner Ed Lapeyri, who operated Chilkoot Lumber at the site from 1986 to
1991, said he only recently gave up hope of re-opening the plant in some fashion. Since
then he’s been watching scrap metal prices, waiting for the mill’s salvage value
to equal the cost of removing nine power transformers contaminated with PCBs.
Specialized Metal Recycling of Lebanon, Ore. is taking down the
mill’s metal buildings, using a giant hydraulic claw and a large electromagnet;
Chilkat Environmental of Haines is handling the transformers.
Removing the mill buildings will allow Lapeyri to make room for an
expanded plant and cold storage for his commercial fishing plant, Chilkoot Caviar. It also
will create space to store fishing boats, he said.
Lapeyri said it was "terrible" to see his dream literally
toppled. "We put over $10 million into the sawmill and $6 million into the power
plant, but it’s not worth anything unless it’s running. It just goes to
scrap."
He said he had ideas for reopening the mill – including to make
chips from bug-killed Canadian lumber – but those didn’t pan out. A new era of
regulations and the limited size of current federal timber sales make mills the size of
this one obsolete, he said.
"There’s no sawmills running anywhere anymore, with the drop
in the housing industry. There’s a lot of mills shut down right now that used to
operate."
Lapeyri expects demolition will yield as much as 5,000 tons of scrap
metal. That includes an eight-foot bandmill Lapeyri bought in the 1980s that he later
discovered was the same one he rode carriage on at a mill in Roseburg, Ore. during a job
he held in 1957. "I should have put that in my front yard."
Watching the former fuel barn building come down was impressive, he
said. "It went down like the Kingdome… I’m going to have my camera when the
powerhouse comes down. That’s a six-story building."
A large shop building used to work on trucks at the plant likely will
be spared for similar use, he said.
A rumor that the 27-acre lot is being bought by a petroleum company is
untrue, he said. "Nobody’s buying the property at this point."
John Schnabel of Haines built the mill in 1967 to reduce shipping costs
and make his operation competitive with the Dante and Russell mill then operating at Jones
Point.
Schnabel this week said he couldn’t compete with Dante and Russell
for local timber sales, so he put his mill on the water so he could economically get
Tongass National Forest timber to Haines.
The Dane and Russell mill, later called Alaska Forest Products, went
under and Schnabel’s mill survived, producing up to 50 million board feet of lumber
per year. Mostly the mill made construction-grade beams sold to Japan, but it also shipped
cottonwood logs to be hewn into traditional Japanese wooden shoes, and prime spruce
sections for guitar tops. Wood chips went to Mitsui and Mitsubishi pulp mills.
Restrictions on logging in the Haines State Forest that reduced his
wood supply and the cost of trying to get the power plant operating so it could supply
town power finally bankrupted the operation in 1983, Schnabel said. He said he’d
invested $11 million into the plant. "It’s a dream I had that never came to
pass."
The mill operated for about another year as Pacific Forest Products
under owner Mike Chittick before closing in 1984.
Lapeyri, who worked in Haines as general manager of Alaska Forest
Products from 1970 until the mill’s closing in 1976, took over Schnabel’s mill
and modernized it in 1987 with a new carriage, head rig, resaw and edgers.
Lapeyri also succeeded in getting the wood-fired power plant working
and powering the town, but the mill closed permanently when financial partner Weyerhaeuser
withdrew its support of the operation.
