Two loaded cars were being hauled uphill, when suddenly, a loud noise startled the mill workers. The trip took about 20 minutes with one and a half cords of wood or 1,500 board feet of lumber being hauled each trip.Within two months of the inclines opening, the first major accident occurred. The lift was 1,400 feet vertically and the rail line 4,000 feet long.As four loaded cars were being hauled up on the endless cable by the steam engine located at the top, four empty ones were let down the other rail, adding to the efficiency of the operation. The incline was built in 1880, with the 8,000 feet of cable weighing 14,000 pounds, taking almost a week to haul and ship from Truckee. Once the lumber was sawed, it was loaded on to small railcars, and these cars were lifted up the mountain by the famous Incline Railroad. Donkey engines, which are steam powered winches, were also in use to snake logs down the ridges and ravines to landings in the 1890s. To get the logs from the forest to the mill, oxen skidded the logs through the rough terrain to dry chutes, which were made of two parallel saplings, where horses would speed them to either the mill, the lake, or later, railroad landings. Heavy machinery generally was freighted by wagon to either Glenbrook or Tahoe City, then by steamer to Overton. A similar road was built up and over the ridge west of Incline Village to Hot Springs, then over the hill to Truckee. Wagon roads were built from Washoe Valley over the mountain to bring in supplies. Transportation was a challenge that required some inventiveness. By the time full operations were underway in early 1881, over 250 loggers, swampers, millmen, woodcutters, camp tenders and mechanics were at work at the mill. The Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine trees werent as large as those found further west in the Sierra Nevada, but these tight-grained Carson Range pines made strong timbers to hold up the earth in the ever deepening stopes and shafts under Virginia City.The sawmills circular saws first filed into logs that were cut in the hills above Crystal Bay, and the lumber was used to build the mill buildings, bunkhouses, cookhouse and other needed facilities on what is now Mill Creek. Crystal Bay was actually named, not for its clear waters, but for George Crystal, who filed the first timber claims in the area in the early 1860s.The SNW&L had bought and leased over 10,000 acres of timberlands along the eastern mountains of Lake Tahoe. Overton who was in charge of building the sawmill and would run all of the operations. They referred to it as Overton Bay, because it was J.B. Most of the wood was cut from the tops of trees cut for lumber, but young trees of every size were also taken.īy November of 1879 they had finished construction on a new larger mill at Crystal Bay on the northeast shore of Lake Tahoe. In 1878 Hobart & Marlette incorporated into the Sierra Nevada Wood & Lumber Company.The Comstock Lode had hundreds of steam engines that were hungry for four foot split pine and fir, using in excess of 100,000 cords a year. In addition to lumber, thousands of cords of firewood were cut for use in the Comstock Lode. From the top of the Washoe Valley, the water went into 7 miles of 12-inch wrought iron pipe, down 1,720 feet and back up again in an inverted siphon.The construction boss of this work was John Bear Overton, who would later, as superintendent, become the absolute final word in the operation for Hobart & Marlette, while still running the Water Company in Virginia City.In 1876 Hobart & Marlette moved their mill, following the ever moving front of falling trees further up into Little Valley. This sawmill cut mining timbers and shipped them to Virginia City by means of a two-and-a- half-mile-V flume that landed the timbers rough lumber on the Virginia & Truckee Railroad.The partners were investors in and provided a lot of the lumber and timbers being used to build the Virginia & Gold Hill Water Company flume which took water from above Incline Village and Marlette Lake through the Carson Range by tunnel. The lumber company he founded ended up lasting longer than the silver boom did.In 1873 Nevada State Controller Walter Hobart and former Nevada and California Surveyor General Seneca Sam Marlette were operating a small sawmill in Little Valley, a secluded valley between Incline Village and the Washoe Valley. Photo courtesy Truckee Donner Historical SocietyĮditors note This is the first in a four-part series on the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company.Walter Hobart was a Nevada mining man who saw lumber production as a sideline to the Comstock Lode silver mining.
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