Governments compete when companies look to locate new factories or plants. Enticements include tax credits, relaxed regulations, and subsidies. Many firms can situate facilities practically anywhere, with factors like workforce availability and transportation foremost. That isn’t true for resource dependent industries like logging or mining. Mills and mines must locate where resources are.
Such was the case in 1907 when August Von Boecklin, Robert D. Moore, and J.E. Manley organized the Manley-Moore Lumber Company, and three years later constructed a large sawmill in the upper Fairfax area of east Pierce County. The mill was built on the south bank of the Carbon River with diverted flow forming the mill pond seen above.
The town featured a one-room store, school house, a 26-room hotel, and fifty dwellings, many of for Japanese workers and their families. A small rail car called a ‘speeder’ made daily trips to Fairfax, about a mile away to pick up the mail and fresh milk each morning. The Manley-Moore operation grew to considerable size becoming one of the state’s biggest mills, producing 150,000 board feet of lumber per day. By 1917, the company employed 100 men at the mill and 100 to 125 in the woods. In 1924, a cedar shingle-mill was added through arrangement with the Hueling brothers.
However, the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent depression decimated lumber operations. Because the homes and structures were built on land leased from the railroad, they were all torn down in time, or moved as leases expired. The last demolition was competed in 1991. Today, nothing is left but the Manley-Moore Road, an offshoot from the Carbon River Road located about two miles before Carbon River Ranger Station. This photo comes courtesy of Stuart Marchalewicz Miller, a Seattle researcher of Polish descent. Historical info was gleaned from “Carbon River Coal Country,” by Nancy Irene Hall in 1980, and “Old King Coal,” a 1917 report on the Pierce County mining district published in the Wilkeson Record by Louis Jacobin. Next week more about Manley-Moore.
