HISTORIC RESCUE

by SCOTT MORRIS Packers Lyle Charter, left, in red shirt, and Alan Hill, right with red suspenders, tie down a 200-plus-pound wheel used in a 1913-era sawmill above Denny. The portable sawmill was packed out and brought to the Jake Jackson Museum in Weaverville where volunteers hope to rebuild the nearly 100-year-old mill. Hauled into the wilderness almost 100 years ago on the backs of mules to provide lumber for a gold mining venture up the East Fork of New River, the last pieces of a historic portable sawmill have been retrieved the same way they likely went in — lashed up and balanced atop a surefooted mule string by packers who knew their business.

Located in the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area about four miles up the East Fork of New River Trail above Denny, the sawmill's final destination was the Jake Jackson Museum in Weaverville where there are plans to reassemble and restore the equipment into working order.

It's been a long way from there to here.

The mill is believed to be the same one mentioned in a 1913 article in The Trinity Journal reporting that Charlie Schwedler and a Mr. Lux were planning to install a sawmill up the East Fork "to fix up their claim so as to be able to handle a large amount of gravel soon." A later article in 1915 reported that the Lux claim by that time had a sawmill in the vicinity of where the 100-year-old relic was located.

by GAY BERRIEN Volunteers, from left, Rick Brandenburg, Scott Morris, Larry McLean, Alan Hill and Lyle Charter weigh sawmill parts in the field June 6. Portable mills were used to make lumber for constructing mining flumes needed to bring water to the placer mines. This particular mill was manufactured by the American Saw Mill Machinery Company founded in 1903 in Hackettstown, N.J.

It's been a five-year mission to retrieve the historic sawmill from the East Fork of New River and donate it to the museum in honor of the late Richard S. Holland of Denny. A former millwright himself, Holland purchased the piece in about 1965 from George Schnitker who had the mining claim at that time. It was common practice then for claimholders to sell objects and equipment on their claims that they had no use for.

by GAY BERRIEN Packer Lyle Charter leads his pack string along the trail from the former sawmill site on June 6. The pack mules carried roughly 200 pounds each. Weighing about 1,800 pounds, the "portable" sawmill was never retrieved out of the backcountry by Holland. It was after his death in 2004 that his children, including daughter Gay Berrien of Big Bar, decided to donate it to the Trinity County Historical Society for which she serves on the board of directors.

"The plan met with some obstacles," she said, noting there was no bill of sale to prove ownership and even if there had been, the equipment was considered to be a historic artifact abandoned on national forest land that perhaps made it illegal for Schnitker to sell in the first place.

The family engaged Weaverville attorney Al Wilkins to prove its claim to the sawmill as private property and the historical society asked the U.S. Forest Service for permission to move it out of the wilderness.

Former Weaverville District Ranger Joyce Andersen, now retired, agreed to pursue the request, sending a forest archaeologist up the trail to evaluate the sawmill onsite and complete a survey report in 2005. Several meetings followed between former Historical Society President Rich Lorenz and Forest Service staff before permission was ultimately granted in 2007.

A first retrieval trip was made in November of that year when hikers and packers brought out about 400 pounds of metal, weighing and sorting the rest for a return trip that was expected to occur within a short time. But winter made some of the rugged trail impassable and then the fires of 2008 closed the New River trails to normal use throughout the summer.

In the end, it took two more trips and numerous volunteers, including hikers with heavily loaded backpacks and two pack-strings of mules, to carry out all remaining pieces of the sawmill.

In search of stout backs to carry some loads, Berrien called on the Weaverville Boy Scout Troop 15 whose 17-year-old James Yacoub decided the mill retrieval and restoration would make an exciting Eagle Scout project as he attempts to earn the highest scouting rank before his 18th birthday next March.

With scoutmaster Ed Leiper, the troop of four joined members of the Junction City fire engine crew Satur day, May 30, on a hike up the East Fork to begin retrieving the rest of the sawmill. Some carried 100-pound packs out and then returned for a second load, traveling 16 miles that day.

Yacoub, who is doing much of the research on the project, has pledged to help raise money for re-fabricating parts that are missing, most notably the circular saw blade.

Berrien said the blade was the only piece of the mill removed from the site by her father and taken to his place at Denny where it later disappeared.

It required stout mules and experienced packers to haul the heaviest remaining pieces of the mill out of the backcountry on Saturday, June 6.

With many years and many miles of pack stock experience between them, the packers included Backcountry Horsemen veterans Alan Hill of Redding and Lyle and Laurie Charter of Coffee Creek; Forest Service packer Larry McLean of Weaverville; and Dick and Scott Morris of Weaverville. Other volunteers, including Historical Society President Rod Plew, hiked in to help lift, weigh and balance the heavy, awkward loads.

Where almost anything could have gone wrong at any precarious moment along the trail with a vertical drop to the river far below, there was only one mishap at the mill site itself when a loaded mule snagged a tree and fell after catching her hind hoofs on a tree root. She had to be unloaded before she would get up, but was not injured.

"We wanted to come today. We knew it would be historical and we thought it might be hysterical," said Laurie Charter as she watched with relief the beloved mule "Molly" calmly rise and shake herself off prior to reloading.

The pack mules carried loads over 200 pounds each, with the heaviest a massive flywheel weighing more than 250 pounds including the side packs filled with wood shavings that were packaged to provide a bed for the wheel to rest on.

Now that all the pieces are safely stored at the museum, work is beginning on the next phase of the project to reassemble and either locate or manufacture missing parts. The goal is to have a working sawmill on display by the end of October.

Berrien cautioned it is not usually an acceptable situation for the Forest Service to allow someone to remove a historic object from the national forest "and there were several hoops we had to go through to get to this point, but we are sure happy the Forest Service has been helping us in this case. The ideal for historic and prehistoric artifacts is to leave them where they are, to help explain their story in their original setting. Of course, in this case, our family sincerely feels the sawmill belonged to our dad."