Archives West Finding Aid

Lumber mill.

At its height, the Port Blakely Mill Company was the largest on the Pacific Coast, and possibly in the entire world. Captain William Renton founded it in 1863 on Bainbridge Island, directly across from Seattle in the Puget Sound. Within a year the mill was turning out 50,000 board feet a day. The PBMCo expanded rapidly, as did the timber industry in Washington territory generally. (In the 1880s, the territory’s annual timber production soared from 160 million board feet to over a billion). Although the California market was the most crucial, the PBMCo shipped its lumber throughout the Pacific Rim. The PBMCo briefly tried to enter the European market, but the long voyage around South America posed too great of a logistical challenge for consistent shipments to Europe.

In 1876, Renton incorporated the company in San Francisco with new partner Charles S. Holmes. Prior to 1885, the PBMCo obtained all its logs by contract with independent operators, since Renton did not want to take on either the additional risk or capital investment of logging camps. The decreasing supply of accessible high-quality lumber and the steady inflation in log prices led him to change his policy. He noted in 1864 that timber “contiguous to the Sound is nearly exhausted.” The company purchased land north of Olympia, and constructed the Puget Sound and Grays Harbor Railroad to transport the logs. By 1891, the company held 80,000 acres of timber land. A fire destroyed the mill in 1888, but a new one, larger and more efficient, was in operation within the year.

The PBMCo would face other stiff challenges in the 1890s, and would do so without the guidance of Renton, who died in 1891. A devastating depression swept the United States in 1893, forcing the company to operate in a hostile economic climate. It also faced increased competition from eastern mills moving into the Pacific Northwest. The St. Paul and Tacoma Lumber Company managed to rival PBMCo’s position as the largest mill in the region during the 1890s. Weyerhaeuser entered the region in 1900, purchasing 900,000 acres of timberland. The PBMCo became increasingly ill-suited for competition with firms better located for participation in the rail and cargo trades.

In February 1903 Renton’s heirs sold the company to two men from Michigan, David E. Skinner and John W. Eddy. The mill burned again in 1907, and the one built to replace it was much smaller. By 1912, the new mill operated only sporadically. Demands generated by the First World War temporarily returned the mill’s economic viability; after the war, the demand crashed, and so did the mill’s brief economic resurgence. Eddy and Skinner closed it in 1922 and divided the PBMCo’s assets. The defunct mill was dismantled in 1924. Eddy bought out Skinner in that same year, and from that point forward the PBMCo relied upon its timber holdings and was exclusively an Eddy family concern.