The Fruit Growers Supply Company was established in 1907 in order to purchase and manage timber and mills to produce box shook for wooden shipping crates for the Southern California Fruit Exchange, which came to be known as Sunkist Fruit Growers. The company had headquarters and sales offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco and camps in Northern California specifically in Hilt, California in Siskiyou County and Susanville, California in Lassen County. A note in the Clark Kinsey inventory also suggests the company may have had a camp at Klamath Falls in Southern Oregon. Hilt became a logging town in 1902 when four Oregon men established the Hilt Sugar Pine Company and mill. The mill was bought in 1906 by the North California Lumber Company, who quickly went bankrupt. Around this time, the Fruit Growers Supply Company of Southern California lended the company money, only to take over and begin recouping their losses by producing wooden boxes for Sunkist. In the 1950s, the company started focusing more on making cardboard, which had come into favor for transporting fruit, and by 1972, the Fruit Growers Supply Company would begin to phase out the Hilt mill. By 1974, the town was gone. (Source: "Hilt, California: A Modern Ghost Town"by Lorna J Smith in the Journal of the West, 39, No. 2, Spring 2000) The company expanded in 1920 when construction engineer P. Swan of Portland went to Susanville to oversee the construction of a new sawmill and box factory in Lassen County. In 1921, the Fruit Growers Supply Company purchased a large swathe of timber in the eastern part of Lassen National Forest from the United States government. This expansion was necessary for the company because of severe lumber shortages during World War I that had hindered business. (Source:"Big Deal Pending in Gov't Timber" The Evening Herald, Klamath Falls, 4-16-1921)
Kinsey Brothers Photographs of the Lumber Industry, 1890-1945
