McCloud Customers
Lorenz Mill


In 1955 the Lorenz Brothers Lumber Company built a sawmill about a mile and a half north of the newly completed line to Burney. The McCloud River Railroad built a long spur into the new mill, which started shipping outbound lumber loads. In 1962 Lorenz sold the mill to to Farley and Loescher, who added a plywood plant to the operations, which added inbound glue and outbound plywood to the railroad's traffic mix.

In 1912, the Paraffin Paint Company of San Francisco purchased a small paper mill in Antioch, California, that had been in business under a succession of owners since 1889. Parrafin merged with National Paper Products Company in 1929 to form Fibreboard Corporation, which dramatically expanded the paper mill over the next several decades. Concerns over maintaining a steady woodchip supply to the Antioch plant caused Fibreboard to start buying sawmills around California in the 1950s, and in 1965 they scooped up the Lorenz plant as part of this effort.

Forest products giant Louisiana Pacific Corporation acquired Fibreboard in 1978, and for a few years in the early 1980s the L-P plywood plant at Lorenz was the only shipper on the railroad of any consequence. Fibreboard had been long involved in the asbestos manufacturing industry, however, which prompted L-P to spin Fibreboard back off as an independent company in mid-1988 to protect itself from the mounting asbestos liability claims. The Lorenz mill would only last for about another year under the new old ownership, as Fibreboard closed the mill for good by the end of 1989. Scrappers tore the mill down over the next several years, and the site is now occupied by Hat Creek Construction Company.


Photos

Tom Moungovan rode a freight to Burney and return in 1966, and he shot these two pictures of the crew switching the Lorenz plant.






Patt Driscoll shot the following photos of the Lorenz mill and plywood plant in the early 1980s.