Glen Blair

Glen Blair End of the Line

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Glen Blair—The End of the Line tells the story of the life and time of a small redwood lumber mill founded by Captain Samuel Blair in 1884. The Captain had married in to the Kelly family of Mendocino years before and chose a man who had also married into that family, Alex MacCallum, to manage the mill. Dairy, the eldest Kelly daughter was his wife. The timber the Pudding Creek Lumber Company owned was some of the finest clear redwood ever harvested.

The company operated sporadically until 1903 when it was sold to C. R. Johnson of the Union Lumber Company and became the Glen Blair Redwood Company. The two other working owners were John Sinclair and Allan Curtis. The new owners rebuilt the mill and bought a Shay locomotive for their new company railroad. However, it was a steam operation all the way, burning wood in all its engines. The mill operated until the lumber market slowed in the ‘20s. It closed in 1925, but the woods continued through 1928. From that time on it sat ready to start until WWII when its tracks were taken up, its mill equipment auctioned off and all of its buildings eventually torn down or burned. Today, nature has reclaimed even the recent clear cuts.

My grandfather, Al Woodward, went to work there shortly after he married Euphemia Kerr. They welcomed three girls into their family, one of whom was my mother. They left in 1893 when a world panic caused all business to come to a halt. - Denise Stanley Stenberg Author

About the Author

Denise, is a retired teacher and a native of Fort Bragg. her mother’s family, for many years, owned a dairy where the Health Club and the hospital are located today. Though she did not live in the area during her school years, she has vivid memories of the dairy; the slaughterhouse and the process of getting the year’s hay stored in the barns. When her uncle Russell Woodward sold that ranch, he bought acreage from the Glen Blair Lumber Company in Little Valley and up the main fork of Pudding Creek and her family was once again connected to Glen Blair.

Glen Blair—The End of the Line was cooperative project: Denise Stenberg gathered information for twenty years from original records, newspapers, books and the interesting people she interviewed, this is her tale of the two Glen Blair companies and the people that lived and worked in the Glen. Bill Millvihill scanned and restored the pictures that bring the story to life, Dennis Freeze designed the book and created the maps on the back cover. The book was published by the Fort Bragg-Mendocino Coast Historical Society.