Description
Company records for Vance Redwood Lumber Company; Hammond Lumber Company, Hammond & Little River Redwood Company, Hammond
Redwood Lumber Company; Georgia- Pacific Corporation; and the Louisiana Pacific Corporation-Samoa Division. Contents include
maps, blueprints, and detailed architectural drawings for buildings, structures, tools, and equipment; timber and railroad
engineering surveys, notes and maps; Engineering Department files and records; public relations and publicity materials including
photographic prints, slides, negatives, and pulp operation newsletter; legal files relating to business transactions, railroad
property disputes, and worker health and safety issues from 1871 to 1992; letters of applications 1923-1924. This collection
documents company operations throughout California and in Oregon; strengths include industrial drawings and architectural
plans for mills, company towns and mobile field camps; an extensive collection of maps and plans documenting logging operations,
property holdings and company railroads; and dealings with major property owners in the region. Sites include Samoa, Samoa
Peninsula, Humboldt Bay, Big Lagoon, Crannell, Eureka, Fieldbrook, Trinidad, the Simpson Pulp Mill; other California operations,
including Mendocino County, Santa Cruz County, the San Pedro lumber yard; Oregon, including Astoria, Hammond, Mill City; Eel
River, Luffenholtz Creek, Little River, Mad River, Redwood Creek; the Eureka and Klamath River Railroad and Northwest Pacific
Railroad, and a full transcript and legal files for the suit between the Eureka and Klamath River Railroad Co. et al VS California
and Northern Railway Co, et al, in 1911.
Background
The Vance and Garwood Lumber Company was established in Eureka in 1856, by John Vance and Joseph S. Garwood of San Francisco.
Garwood was primarily an investor and Vance assumed the role of manager until 1863, when Garwood drowned in a boat accident
and he became sole owner. Vance expanded the operation along the Eureka waterfront until he passed away in 1892. Shortly afterward
the mill burned down, which provided an opportunity for his heirs to construct a larger mill on the Samoa Peninsula, across
the Bay. In 1900, the Vance Redwood Lumber Company was sold to multimillionaire industrialist A.B. Hammond. He began his lumber,
railroad and mercantile career in Montana and had already acquired other operations in the Pacific Northwest, invested in
lumber and railroads and developed the Columbia River Canneries. Hammond purchased mills and retail outlets in California
and Oregon. He expanded his operations in Samoa with a modern new mill and expanded network of logging railroads. After seeing
the lumber company towns in the Pacific Northwest, Hammond decided to construct a company owned worker community in Samoa.
After WWII he created one of the largest lumber yards in the West in San Pedro, California, to serve the postwar building
boom. Although the business headquarters of the company was in San Francisco, financial hub of Northern California, the operations
headquarters remained in Samoa. The Hammond Lumber Company was sold to the Georgia Pacific Corporation in 1956, which moved
the company headquarters to Portland, Oregon. As a result of a Federal Trade Commission order to Georgia Pacific to divest
part of its plywood operations, the Louisiana Pacific Corporation was created in 1972 and received all of the local company
holdings. The mill and town were sold in 1998 to a new company called Simpson-Samoa. In 2000, Simpson-Samoa reopened the pulp
mill, which had closed in 1993, and sold the remainder of the site to the Samoa Pacific Group LLC. Most of the buildings on
the mill site had been demolished. At that time, the town of Samoa was one of only two intact lumber company towns in northwestern
California.
Extent
14 map cabinets with approximately 3000 maps, plans and drawings; approximately 300 maps, plans and drawings on rolling tubes;
63 boxes of documents; one five-drawer file cabinet of vendor catalogues; one oversize flat file box of computer circuit diagrams.