The Westport Lumber Company was formed ca. 1910 in Westport in Clatsop County. The town of Westport was founded in 1856 when a settler named John West established a small water-powered mill at the town site. The Westport Lumber Company based its operations in Westport but its city sales office was in the city of Portland at the NW Bank Building. Myron C. Woodard was the founder and president of the company. Born in Watertown, Wisconsin, he was a prominent lumberman who was also the founder and president of the Silver Falls Timber Company in Silverton. Woodard purchased the mill site at Westport in 1910 and began constructing a large electric sawmill for his Westport Lumber Company. In a 1918 ad, it was boasted that "modern houses" were leased to employees with families while single men were "taken care of in a very comfortable hotel, in which steam heat, hot and cold water in each room, shower baths and other modern conveniences have been installed." During World War I, the mill would run three eight hour shifts a day, and by the late 1920's, the company had reached its peak production, after which the company began to go into decline. There was a brief increase of activity again during World War II, but the lumber production effort effectively eliminated any remaining old-growth timber that was left within economic reach of the mill. Transportation costs had become prohibitively expensive and the company would soon close in the late 1940's and the mill would be torn down in 1956. Woodard died at the age of 71 in 1946, the same year he had retired from the logging industry. (Sources: Lumber Ghosts by Kenneth A. Erickson; "The Westport Lumber Company - Advertisement" The Oregonian, 01-01-1918; "Westport Mill May Close Up" The Oregonian, 04-28-1945; and "M.C. Woodard Succumbs at 71" The Sunday Oregonian, 04-21-1946)
Kinsey Brothers Photographs of the Lumber Industry, 1890-1945
