Interview with Tom Maxwell on July 18, 2000, concerning the Christie Mill. Interviewer, Smith Virgil for the Placer County Historical Society. George Lay Pres. Transcriber, Barbara Dorer Van Riper.
My name is Thomas Herbert Maxwell. I’m 56 years old and live in Auburn. Lived here most of my life, since 1945. I was two years old when my family moved to Auburn from Plumas County. My father’s name was Herbert Maxwell and my mother’s maiden name was Crystal Johnson. She came from Butte County, a little town called Biggs. Actually, she lived in East Biggs where her family settled in about 1921. They came out from North Dakota. My mother went to Chico State and graduated there in about 1936 or 37, with a teaching credential. She got a job in a little mill town up in Plumas County called Sloat. That’s where she met my father, who was a logging contractor in the area. I think they were in a little town called Cromberg(sp) which is just a couple of miles from Sloat.
His family had been in Sierra Valley since the 1800’s. I can’t tell you exactly when, but his mother, her family were the Nichols. My father’s grandfather was Herbert Nichols. It was my understanding that the Nichols had the first lumber mill in Sierra Valley. They lived in Loyalton and the mill was in Sierra City which was very close by in that valley. Both the Nichols and the Maxwells came out from the state of Maine sometime after the Gold Rush and were loggers and whatever they needed to do to make a living at that time. One of the things they did, was they cut ice up at Boca for the trains that went through Portola for the produce that was going east.
Anyway, when my mother got the job at Sloat, which was a small school, there may have been one other teacher at the school. She stayed with a family up there, the Andrews. His name was Art Andrews, who ran the Box Factory at Sloat. Through him, my mother became acquainted with my father and that’s how they met. After they got married, they took up residency at Portola. That’s probably where my father lived before that. My mother quit teaching. Actually, they didn’t live at Portola, they lived just west of Portola in an area called Delleker, which was a little mill town. That’s where my sister and me were raised, up until I was two years old and my sister was five years old when we moved to Auburn. Both of us were born over in Reno, which is, I believe about fifty or sixty miles from Delleker and Portola. Anyway that was where the nearest hospital was.
When the war came around, they closed the mills down, or began operating at a minimum capacity and my father sold his equipment and we moved down to Auburn. I know one thing my father did during the war, he was too old to enlist or fight, he took his logging equipment and went down to Stockton and helped build an air base down there. After that we moved up to Auburn. My sister, was a couple of years older than me. Her name is Penny Bingham and she lives in Sacramento. My brother who’s about five years younger was born in Auburn at the Highland Hospital and currently resides in Auburn.
After the war, the demand for timber, because of all the increased need for housing, got my father back into the lumber business. He and another old timer from the Sierras, I don’t know exactly where, Fred Christie was from, but Reno and all around that area. He was a millwright and my father and him, built a mill or had a mill built up east of Foresthill. About twelve miles east of Foresthill up on the head waters of E1Dorado Creek. That mill operated for about four years. It was built for the purpose of logging a certain number of sections up there that belonged to an individual from San Francisco. I believe his name was Simrac. A financier or something. It was a mining claim he owned up there. I think it was just an investment he had made and after the war he wanted to make some money and sold the timber off of it.
The mill employed probably in excess of 50 men up there. I don’t know for sure how many, but it was a good size operation. They had a cook house up there. It was actually far enough out of Foresthill so you couldn’t commute to work. They had a regular little mill town up there. There was a cook house and a bunk house. A number of the workers, who had families, built cabins up there along one of the forks of – it’s Indian Creek up there. There’s two forks of Indian Creek which formed El Dorado Creek. The mill and the mill pond was on the one fork and the other fork, there were five or six cabins going up that fork. When they first started up there. Fred Christie’s wife was the cook. There were a lot of McKenzies up there. Charley McKenzie was the woods boss. Charley was from Auburn and his son Wade McKenzie and his sister, I think her name is Barbara Dobbas, I think she married Jim Dobbas, still live in Auburn. They were both here and Wade’s still driving truck. There were a lot of old families. They probably settled here after working at the mill up there. There was a guy named Sweat who had a couple of kids that I went to school with. Dave Sweat, I can’t think of the old man’s name, but he was a tree faller.