Caption on image: Mill City School PH Coll 516.1475

Hammond Lumber Company was a large timber company owned by Andrew B. Hammond that was incorporated in 1912. The company would grow to have sawmills and logging operations from Alaska to Arizona, mostly concentrated in Oregon and California in towns such as Mill City, Astoria, Samoa, and Eureka with sales offices in cities such as Portland and San Francisco. Andrew B. Hammond was a successful businessman and banker from Montana, where he had a monopoly on business in the western half of the state. For this reason, he was known as the "Missoula Octopus". After the financial crisis of 1893, several railroad companies had gone bankrupt, including several in Oregon. Hammond bought the Oregon Pacific Railroad and the Astoria and Columbia River Railroad during the 1890's while also buying up timberlands near the Coast Range of Oregon. By continuing to build the railroads, the Hammond Lumber Company was able to open up new areas for logging that had been previously inaccessible. Hammond died in 1934 at the age of 85, and only a year later, some of the mills would begin to close because of the Depression. (Source: "Economic Phoenix: How A.B. Hammond Used the Depression of 1893 and a Pair of Defunct Oregon Railroads to Build a Lumber Empire"by Greg Gordon, from the Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 109, No. 4, 2008)