Home » Features » History Mystery #84: North Fork Lumber Mill Teepee Burner
Picture of a North Fork Lumber Mill teepee burner
Do you know anything about this teepee burner at the North Fork Lumber Mill?

History Mystery #84: North Fork Lumber Mill Teepee Burner

By Don Grove

This is a photograph of the teepee burner at the North Fork lumber mill. Sawdust and scraps of wood from the milling process were burned in the teepee burner. In the June 1951 newsletter of the Associated Lumber & Box Company sawmill — The American Eagle — the teepee burner and mill pond were operational.

On what year and month was the teepee burner retired? Also, what year and month did the mill pond get filled in with dirt to allow logs to be unloaded directly off the logging trucks to the conveyors to haul the logs into the mill?

Please advise us by writing in your comments, or sending your reply to northforkhistorygroup@gmail.com.

FOLLOW-UP TO HISTORY MYSTERY #83

We received only two comments but there were quite a few views. We have framed the information that we have regarding those who lived in the adobe and hung it on the wall inside the Adobe.  Visitors to the museum can see the list of people that lived in the Adobe.

The museum will open April 25 for this year’s tourist season. Hours will be:
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday: 10 a.m.  – 2 p.m.
Sunday: noon – 4 p.m.
Monday: 10 a.m. – noon.

For more information, please call Karen Morris, president, Coarsegold Historical Society & Museum at 559-642-4448. Leave a message and she will call you back.

 

One comment

  1. The North Fork History Group received an email comment on this History Mystery #84. It is edited to reduce space here.
    From Shelley Sturm Lyttle
    Wow, hard to believe it has been nearly 50 years since I used to sit in the science room, mornings, at the North Fork School watching smoke from the mill incinerator, drift downstream, more or less following the basin that is the South Fork of Willow Creek. Those were school years of 1969-1972.

    I graduated from the North Fork School in 1972, so, I believe the incinerator operated, at least into 1972.

    When I was in college, or, would be home from college in the summertime, circa the late 1970s, I can recall following ‘chip trucks’, as they rolled from the North Fork mill, toward an unknown destination somewhere on the valley floor. The chip tricks hauled-off wood waste, that used to be burned.

    I cannot remember that anyone ever called it a tipi-burner. I think we always called it the incinerator. We thought it was shaped more like a badmitton shuttlecock, than a tipi.

    Best regards,
    Shelley Sturm Lyttle

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