Atlantic Forestry September 2020

Those were the good old days

by David Palmer
The route from Fredericton to Miramichi is strewn with the wreckage of dead mills. When I first took command of Starship YSC in 1988, there were 14 operating mills along that 170-kilometre stretch of timber country; today there are only three – four if you count a modest start-up launched recently in Blackville.

Starting in Fredericton, Devon Lumber is alive and, I think, reasonably well. Certainly the management team is strong, they’ve had an absolutely stellar retail year, and lumber prices are red hot, to say the least. Yet, once the current ownership generation lapses, civic planners probably have other designs for one of the last industrial properties smack-dab in the centre of an up-and-coming residential area (just like the 31-acre FREX exhibition site in the heart of Fredericton’s west end). The city’s walking trails converge and divide near the back gate of this immaculate, well-kept cedar and spruce mill, and the pleasant smell of fresh-sawn timber helps moderate the sewer gases seeping from the waste treatment facility. At one time, settlements grew up around industries, and owed their existence to them – but now cities have forgotten their beginnings and tend to push any remaining industry to their outskirts, seemingly embarrassed by the clank and clang of machinery. 

Up the Nashwaak Valley, before gently tipping over into the Miramichi watershed, there were two mills. Sparkes Lumber, near Stanley, was one of the province’s few hardwood and hemlock sawmills. Nashwaak Valley Wood Energy, a community-owned pellet mill at Portage, was the brainchild of former MLA Kirk MacDonald and the late Peter deMarsh. It offered a much-needed low-grade market, but was hampered by production problems, burned through a lot of cash trying to find solutions, and was eventually forced into bankruptcy, dashing the hopes of many for an enterprise owned by woodlot owners. 

TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER

Two mills near Boisetown operated into the late ’90s. The Ashley-Colter mill sawed mostly spruce, and sold most of its lumber to Ireland. It had a good set of kilns; an outdated, outdoor green chain; and an old bee-hive burner to get rid of bark and sawdust. In later years, encouraged by a provincial value-added initiative, the owners added a grinder and dye machine, and sold coloured mulch. When it closed, the company sold its 45,000 acres of timberland in blocks, to the highest bidder. At the other end of McCarty Flats was a small hardwood mill originally run by the Doak family. I remember having a load of hardwood slabs delivered to our home in Fredericton and dumped in the driveway by Jimmy Doak himself one Saturday morning.

Boisetown and Doaktown were the heart of horse-logging, and the Russell and Swim pine sawmill used them extensively on its logging operations. Myles Russell gave a group of YSC office staff a tour of one of these operations in the fall of 1989. It was a thrill to watch the horses dragging the big logs out, and the woodsmen expertly maneuvering their well-trained steeds to build a “brow” – a pile of perfectly stacked logs that would stay in place until the ground was frozen solid and enough snow accumulated to build a winter road to get the logs out.

Mr. Russell was not a happy camper, as he had just found out that his partner, who owned 51 percent of the mill, had sold his share to the Irvings. A few years after making this acquisition, JDI built a large value-added processing facility and new boiler – a sorely-needed investment that seemed to guarantee a future upgrade for the 1950s-era sawmill. In 2014, when the Forestry Deal was signed, JDI committed to building a brand-new sawmill, but as the years rolled by and no firm announcement was forthcoming, that commitment appeared to waver. Finally, in 2020, JDI announced plans to move forward with a $25 million sawmill project. What triggered that final decision is uncertain. Market factors, which had been cited in the past as a reason for not proceeding, are even more volatile today, despite the torrid lumber market.  

There was always a question as to whether the supply of White pine alone would be sufficient to keep a big, new mill running at full capacity, and the rumour was that JDI was wrangling for some of the large spruce log allocation that was formally assigned to Miramichi Lumber. We won’t know the answer to this question until the project is complete and spruce logs are rolling into the mill. In any event, the project is good news for the Doaktown region, and it fulfills JDI’s final commitment under the Forestry Plan.

STRING OF BANKRUPTCIES

Just past Doaktown, at Blissfield, was a small cedar mill owned by the Gilkes family. It became one of a string of bankruptcies at the turn of the century, which included Juniper Lumber, and left YSC as a creditor owed $38,000. I stopped in one day shortly after the mill closed to see if there was any chance of recovering any funds, and found the place deserted. There were a few boards on the outfeed chain, so I grabbed the last one and brought it back to the office. I wrote “Last board at Blissfield Lumber - $38,000” on it, and leaned it against the office reception wall as a reminder. 

Blackville Lumber – a mid-sized, one-shift, spruce-fir sawmill – was a going concern, and it became part of REPAP’s holdings when they acquired the pulp and paper mills at Nelson and Newcastle (now known as Miramichi City). It was shut down in 2007, then acquired by Danny Anderson (who owned Newcastle Lumber, later Miramichi Lumber). He used the still-working kilns to dry his lumber before shipping it to the U.S.

The Blackville site, along with a portable bandsaw, was purchased by Byron Connors in 2019. Since then, Connors has been sawing hemlock and tamarack for beams and timbers, and also processing firewood in the yard. He says he has been working with the First Nations group that is reportedly in discussion with the Department of Natural Resources and Energy Development regarding acquisition of the Kent licence. The licence was formerly managed by the OSB mill in Chatham, but the mill’s last two owners were not interested in doing so, and the land is now managed by a small consortium of private individuals.  

ONCE-MIGHTY

Our time journey is wrapping up as we arrive in the Miramichi, once the enviable wood market emporium of the province – the proverbial pot at the end of the rainbow. It had a sawmill, a plywood mill, an OSB mill, and two pulp mills. There was almost nothing that grew on a Northumberland woodlot that you could not sell right here at home. But where there were once five mills, today there is only one: the Arbec OSB plant. 

The plywood mill, once owned by the DePow family, traded hands a number of times before falling under the control of the Tozer family, who had so many irons in the fire that they couldn’t keep them all going. Eventually, after burning through $70 million of provincial money, the flames enveloped the whole suite of businesses. I remember walking around the grandly re-opened plant with a refreshment in hand, wondering how long this enterprise was going to last. Sometimes the line between a con man and an entrepreneur is so thin that many people can’t see it.  

The two big pulp mills are missed the most. Operated under various ownership flags over the years, they reached their heyday as REPAP (“paper” spelled backwards, as flamboyant owner George Petty was fond of repeating), and had a big contract with Time magazine, whose director of sustainable development, David Refkin, made a special trip to the Miramichi to tour managed woodlots. This was in response to environmentalists scaling the Time Warner building in New York and unfurling a banner accusing the company of sourcing its paper from non-sustainable sources. It was heady days for REPAP, but the company kept racking up debt. Pressured by shareholders and circumstances, Petty sold the firm to Finnish company UPM-Kymmene, which was looking for a foothold in North America. But when there was a downturn in the industry, the small, 400-tonne/day kraft mill was deemed to be high-cost, and it was unceremoniously closed. 

The saddest tale is that of the four-generation, family-owned Anderson sawmill. Located smack in downtown Miramichi at the north end of the Anderson bridge, it never looked like much of a mill, but Danny Anderson could make it churn out wood. It was the first choice of local woodlot owners, who were quick to support Anderson in his struggles. When lumber markets collapsed in 2004, many sawmills took extended down time, but Anderson kept operating, went bankrupt, re-structured, and managed to find financial backers, including the government, to invest in the mill’s future. A fire ended the operation, though it was insured; the government, which held the policy as collateral against the loan, swooped in and collected the payout. Stymied by lack of cash, and thwarted by the government, Anderson was out of options. A second fire, in 2019, probably sealed the mill’s fate.

We humans naturally tend to view the world from where we stand now, and often the conclusion is that things aren’t good. Some 20 or 30 years later, in retrospect, that original view may have changed dramatically. Looking back today, I see that despite all the perceived challenges of the day, woodlot owners had it made back then.