Interviewer: I think the father’s name was David also.

I think it was a cousin or brother-in-law, Wilson. was a tree faller also. His family is still in Auburn. His son, Gil Wilson, is still around. There was a family in Foresthill by the name of Lee. When I was a kid about six or seven, my father would take me up there and I’d stay for two or three days at a time. He pawned me off on the Lee’s up there. They were kids about my age, about two or three of them. We" d just stay out of the way and play out there in the woods. But I m not sure what he did up there – Mr. Lee.

After the mill was up and operating, I'm not sure for how many seasons, Fred Christie, left and went back to Reno. I think his expertise was in building mills, not operating them. So after it was up and running, he moved out of Auburn. He had three children – step children, I think. Tim and Dick Christie and Jerri. Virginia Christie had been married prior to this. Her (married name) was Henry, before. So Tim, I think he went by Christie and Dick by Henry, Jerri went by Henry also. She married Richard Bell.

There’s a lot of names, I’m sure if I saw a list, I’d remember, but the names that come to mind are Mel Slade, he was an old timer around Auburn and he died about four or five years ago. But he was a cat skinner up there. Bruce McKenzie was another cat skinner up there. I was pretty young then, but my mother, who is still living in Auburn here, Crystal, talks about the mill and what was going on and the names all the time, but it seems to be a number that she refers to most of thc time. The mill had a band saw, rather than a circular saw. They had a sawyer, that sharpened the saw. They raised it up into a second story there.

The logs were brought down out of the hills. For the first two years, there was so much timber up there, that they just skidded the logs directly down into the mill pond. It wasn’t necessary to truck them, it was that close. The last year, maybe the last year and a half, during the season, they did truck the logging. The logs were dumped into the mill pond and were taken up a conveyor chain up to the saw, to the carriage that moved back and forth to make the cuts. The cut timber then went on to a green chain and was carried out to a point where they would take the cut lumber off the green chain and stack it out in an area that it would be picked up by lumber trucks and transferred out of the valley, the valley where the mill was, was too small to stack lumber, so they had to move it from there to an area where it could be dried. The place that this was done, was between Auburn and Foresthill on a ridge up there, that’s just at the top of a road called Drivers Flat. It’s a beautiful ridge out there, probably a quarter of a mile or better, long, just right at the edge of the canyon there. They would haul the lumber out there, stack it and from there it was sold. The scraps from up at the mill there, the scrap pieces continued on down the conveyor belt that carried them out probably a hundred feet or better past the mill, where they had a burner and it was always burning and all the scrap lumber fell into the burner and was disposed of in that manner.

Interviewer: The mill itself, was everything run by steam?

The mill had a boiler that generated steam and I think they used oil to run the boilers and then, I’m not sure, but I think that powered an engine that ran everything. What type of an engine that was, I couldn’t tell you.

Interviewer: Did it convert that to electricity – was the saw run with electricity or steam.