Missoulian - Former Superior lumber mill now home to three wood products businesses

Tim Collins, plant supervisor at Tricon Timber Post and Pole near Superior, saws the ends off poles in the mill's yard last week.
Photo by MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian

SUPERIOR - Laurie Johnston fed a wooden pole into the doweling machine that fed the pointer-capper that passed it on to the trim saw. The straighter poles moved on to the splitter.

By then, Johnston had initiated the process another dozen times.

The vernacular of the lumber milling world may be alien to many ears these days, but Johnston is right at home at Tricon Timber Post and Pole east of Superior.

It's the newest of three distinct wood products operations on the milelong mill site that started as the Diamond Match mill in 1953. A pellet mill and a bark plant were chugging along around the clock just downstream.

DAW Forest Products bought the traditional lumber mill from Diamond in 1985. Crown Pacific took over in October 1993 and closed the whole thing down in 1994.

“My grandpa was a mechanic for the DAW mill when it was Diamond,” Johnston said last week. “My mom worked cleanup for DAW and my dad worked in the log yard.”

Johnston herself worked as a “flunkie” at DAW's logging camps over Hoodoo Pass in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest. She got on at the post and pole plant when St. Regis-based Tricon bought it from Mick Bailey and opened in July 2005.

Bailey built the plant on what had been the log yard at the Diamond and DAW mills, the same yard in which Johnston's father worked.

Waste material from the Tricon plant is trucked across a vacant lot to the Eureka Pellet Mill, which opened in 2003.

Farther north are stack upon stack of plastic bags filled with landscape bark at the Mountain West bark plant.

Johnson Bros. Contracting of Missoula purchased the vacated mill site in 1995 and now shares ownership of the pellet and bark operations, according to Derek Nelson, a vice president at Johnson Bros.

The home base for the pellet mill, in Eureka, opened in 1988 and ranks among the largest pellet producers of residential fuel in the country, he said. Johnson Bros. has other bark plants in Idaho, South Dakota, Colorado and California.

The Superior enterprises are a three-pronged sign of the times. All rely on small-diameter timber and its byproducts, which lumber mills of yore had little use for.

“The wood products industry is trying to rethink itself,” said Larry Swanson, director of the Missoula-based Center for the Rocky Mountain West. “They're moving away from the single focus of producing dimension lumber and moving into these niche markets.”

Most of Tricon's posts, poles and rails come from trees with diameters of 3-6 inches, though the mill can handle 2-inchers, plant supervisor Tim Collins said.

Tricon added a second shift last month, and the mill plans to branch out further with a metal fabrication operation.

“We're learning as we go,” said manager Angelo Ververis, who also manages Tricon's lumber mill in St. Regis, Mineral County's largest employer.

“We're doing pretty well with the post and pole,” Ververis said. “The market is more stable (than that of the lumber mill). It doesn't fluctuate as much.”

Each operation at Superior employs 20-25 people. Added together, that's still fewer than half the 160 workers who were cast out in 1994 when Crown Pacific closed its Superior operations.

Sharon Patterson was one of those cast into the unemployment line in 1994. She said the Crown Pacific closure was a shock to a county with fewer than 4,000 residents.

But Patterson, now administrative assistant for the Mineral County Extension Service, said it's water under the bridge now.

“We lost a lot of good families when the mills closed,” Patterson said. “Yes, it hurt the county economically. But it's just like losing your parent, the grieving process that you go through. It's time for Mineral County to move beyond all that.”

Patterson estimated up to 50 displaced workers took advantage of training offered displaced workers by state and private programs.

She had two years of schooling paid for at the University of Montana's College of Technology, where she earned an associate degree in accounting.

“Some took computer courses, some went into electronics, some went into refrigeration, some went into welding,” she said.

New, stable businesses have sprung up in Mineral County in the past 10 years. Last week, Mineral County became the pilot project of Montana Challenge, which is designed to identify economic opportunities over the next 18-24 months.

Tricon and the Johnson Bros. operations are among the positive signs, said Jim DeBree, director of the Mineral County Economic Development Corp.

“They're pretty stable as far as year-round employment goes, with some down times,” DeBree said.

Nelson said the bark plant is operating 24 hours a day, and the pellet plant is going nonstop five days a week.

“They continue to do well,” he said. “There's always that question in western Montana that anybody involved in the forest products industry always faces. Raw material source issues are always at the forefront.”

Because of Montana's remoteness, freight costs are often double and triple what they are for his company's bark plants in other states, Nelson said.

In fact, “Montana is by far the most difficult to do business in” because of property tax codes, pollution restrictions and the like.

“It's unbelievable what they run you through,” Nelson said. “(The state) punishes you every time you go out to create capital investment. What we've found is it's even easier in California.”

Still, the Superior site has attractions. It's on both Interstate 90 and the Montana Rail Link line, and both means are used to transport finished products coming from the old Diamond Match site.

“We want very much to see Superior succeed,” Nelson said. “Obviously, we think our two plants up there can play a very big role in that. In terms of going out and investing and putting our money here in Montana and creating jobs, we'd love to do more of that.”

Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com

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