In this aerial view of the Wrangell mill from 1970, a chip barger is prepared for transport to Sitka's pulp mill. Billowing smoke, at right was the mill's bark burner and at left its boiler for steam power generation.
A shipment of lumber processed at the Petersburg mill awaits unloading at Wrangell in 1966. Timber from area mills made their way to Wrangell for export abroad to Japanese markets.
Editor's note: Frank Roppel was in the timber industry from 1956 to 2002 and a Wrangell resident since 1992. After graduating from high school in Ketchikan and receiving a degree from Oregon State University, he began full time employment for Ketchikan Pulp Company in 1959. Rising to sawmills manager, Roppel became the first president of Sealaska Timber in 1980, and served as executive vice president and general manager of Alaska Lumber and Pulp from 1984 until its closure.
At the advice of his wife, the late writer and historian Patricia Roppel, he began putting together a history of the local timber industry. The work went unpublished, and at the advice of a friend Frank has asked the Wrangell Sentinel to run his history. The paper is pleased to present this final installment of a three-part serialization of his work.
By Frank Roppel
With a new market in Japan for primary manufactured logs, called "cants" or "resaw timbers," the Wrangell sawmill began 40 years of success. The first shipload of 3,240,000 board feet of lumber to Japan was swung aboard the Kosho Mauru in July 1955. This shipment was not an immediate success, and Alaska Lumber and Pulp – doing business as Wrangell Lumber Company (WLC) – lost money on the shipment.
Japanese buyers were not familiar with the Alaska species, and Japanese size standards were different. It took over a year to sell the first cargo. Gradually the quality of spruce and hemlock became known, and sales from Alaska increased. WLC shipped 3.3 million board feet in 1956, 6.1 million in 1957, and 14.2 million in 1958. Sales to Japan continued to increase every year reaching 55 million in 1961 and 83 million in 1964.
At that time a full shipload was being loaded every two weeks. Until 1964, WLC was the only Alaska mill selling to Japan. WLC established a large sales force in Japan, and demand now exceeded the supply from the Wrangell mill. To meet the demand, in 1964, WLC began selling lumber produced by other mills in Southeast including Ketchikan Spruce Mills, Schnabel Lumber Company, and Alaska Forest Products, the latter two located in Haines.
Several years later, a mill in Petersburg named Mitkof Lumber Company sent lumber to Wrangell by barge from Petersburg for loading on the ships serving WLC. In 1967, WLC shipped 251 million feet of lumber with a value of $27 million from Wrangell and other Southeast ports.
To further meet the growing demand and to acquire additional log resources, in about 1968, WLC purchased the Pacific Northern Timber (PNT) mill and its USFS log supply contract. PNT had built a mill and started operations in 1962 at Shoemaker Bay south of town. ALP (Wrangell Lumber Company) converted the Shoemaker Bay mill to cut 4-inch "baby squares" for the Japanese market. In 1980, the former PNT mill was completely rebuilt, and all ALP sawing operations were transferred to it.
The old "town mill" was closed and later torn down, thus ending 93 years of lumber production at that site. The new mill had the largest capacity of any mill in Alaska, well over 100 million board feet capacity per year. Production of over 400,000 board feet in one day was frequently achieved. A full shipload of lumber was produced every two weeks. During good market periods, the logs were sawn in two eight-hour shifts per day, five days and occasionally six days per week. The scale of technology and operations could scarcely have been imagined by the first Wrangell sawmill operators nearly 100 years earlier.
Another product, wood chips, contributed to the Golden Age. During the 1960 period as the lumber production rapidly increased, pulp mills had begun operating in Southeast Alaska: Ketchikan in 1954 and Sitka in 1959. The pulp mills needed wood chips, and sawmill waste – the portion of the tree that could not be made into saleable lumber – became an important fiber source and a major advancement in the full utilization of the tree.
Previously wood waste was most often burned in the familiar "teepee" cone-shaped burners. WLC also had wood fired boilers that burned a substantial portion of the best quality waste to produce both electricity and steam power for the sawmill. In 1967, a large waste wood chipper was installed at the downtown mill, along with chip loading facilities. Since the pulp mill at Sitka, owned by the same company, needed "clean" (without bark) chips, large bark removal machines were installed near the log intake conveyor at the sawmill.
The addition of the chipping business helped the economy of the sawmill. Soon the other mills at Ketchikan and Haines were also chipping waste wood for sale to the pulp mills at Sitka and Ketchikan. The full utilization of the logs coupled with the increased market acceptance in Japan improved the economics of milling, pulping and logging in the Tongass to the point that in 1980, 454 million board feet of logs were harvested and made into lumber in six major sawmills and into pulp at two pulp mills.
During the 1970-1995 period, roughly 50 percent of the logs harvested in the Tongass went to a sawmill. During that time, Ketchikan, Metlakatla, Klawock, Haines and Petersburg, in addition to Wrangell ran large mills. The other 50 percent of harvested low grade logs went directly to the pulp mills for chipping. Their logs were not of high enough quality to make economically saleable lumber.
In Wrangell sawmill employment was as high as 240 workers. An additional 32 longshoremen had nearly full-time work. Sometimes there was one ship at the dock loading and another standing by. By 1990, annual payrolls exceeded $10 million for the sawmill, not counting the longshoring, tug, and timber harvest operations.
With the passage of the Tongass Timber Reform Act by Congress in 1990, the supply of timber needed by the two pulp mills and large export sawmills was severely curtailed, and large scale operations ceased shortly thereafter. Alaska Pulp Corporation (originally ALP) closed its Wrangell sawmill at Shoemaker Bay in 1995. The mill was later sold to Richard Buhler of Silver Bay Logging, who continued to operate the mill intermittently until 2008, only when logs were available.
Demolition of the mill was essentially completed in 2011, with only the dock, chip loading facility, office, and a few shop buildings remaining. The old "downtown mill" city sawmill site was purchased by the City of Wrangell and currently has a dock, Trident's fish processing facility, a boat haul-out, repair shops, and boat storage.
Wrangell's sawmill stands out not only for large production – approximately 4.5 billion board feet of lumber produced – and long continuity of operations, but particularly for initiating large scale sales to Japan in 1955 that were to usher in the 40-year Golden Era of sawmill operations. Wrangell's sawmilling tradition is continued today by Mike Allen, who operates a small, by comparison, sawmill to supply local needs. Occasionally he ships high-grade product to the Puget Sound for further
processing. There are other small Volkswagen-style mills
such as the one operated by Jim Colier, producing lumber and other wood products for local use. He recently cut the cedar blocks that were adzed to repair the Chief Shakes House and totem poles.
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