Vaagen Brothers Lumber is a fourth-generation business based in Colville, Washington, east of the Cascades. Today, we specialize in processing small logs, and in so doing we produce a good quantity of chips and bioenergy feedstocks, but the company has undergone many changes in size, scale, and shape since our beginnings in the 1920s, when my great-grandfather, Valmer Anderson, began setting up a series of small sawmills to cut products for the family’s homestead about 20 miles east of Colville, as well as for other homesteaders in the region. We have been doing business as Vaagen Brothers Lumber since 1952, when my grandfather, Bert Vaagen, and his brother, Bud, applied their growing knowledge base to modernize production and expand capacity and our product line. My father, Duane Vaagen, began leading the company in the 1980s.
During the 1970s, federal timber sales were expanding, and Vaagen Brothers Lumber was well-positioned to buy much of the available resource. We were expanding our capacity, tripling our size in the early 1980s, purchasing the former LP mill in Ione, Washington, and a mill in Republic, Washington. For nearly a decade, that program worked pretty well. In 1989 the Colville National Forest produced 128 million board feet of timber—about 70% of the company’s resource needs. We employed 495 and produced about 250 million board feet of lumber products. We built strong relationships with our by-product customers to optimize transportation and the related infrastructure investments.
Everyone now knows the story of the Spotted Owl and the Timber Wars of the 1990s. Vaagen Brothers Lumber was not immune. The volume of USFS timber offered for sale dropped from 128 million board feet in 1989 to less than 20 million feet by the late 1990s. Mills that had been purchased surrounded by an ocean of federal timber were suddenly isolated, with scarce log supply and stiff competition from others in a death march.
Just as mills were closing and communities were struggling, a loud group of people were finding success in opposing those few timber sales that were offered, alleging environmental harm. Whatever these people’s and organizations’ motives, the effects of these legal actions were devastating to many families and communities. The Forest Service was not equipped to respond to this new-found scrutiny. As in many other such cases, the mills in Ione and Republic had to close due to a lack of logs.
From Forest Operations Review: https://forestoperationsreview.org/item/503-adaptation-and-collaboration-a-western-lumber-business-confronts-timber-withdrawal