Old Missoula

Montana Forest Products for All America from Bonner Mill

 

 

 

This is a full page of photos from the Anaconda Company Lumber Mill – Bonner.

Captions from 9 Photographs on Page 20 Section E

1. Selective cutting leaves an adequate source for reproducing Montana’s fine timber for generations to come. Timber land management plays a very important part in The Anaconda Company’s timber harvesting practices.

2. The power saw is the tool used by the modern lumberjack in felling the fine timber of Western Montana. Careful selection of mature trees for cutting leaves ‘seed’ trees to provide other crops in years to come.

3. The logs reach the mill by both railroad and truck. Many miles of access roads into timber stands are built and maintained by The Anaconda Company so that the logs may be transported to the mill. Modern loading machines such as the one here aid in unloading logs. The machine in the picture can lift an entire truckload of 35 tons in one bite, and carry them away.

4. On the band saw carriage, huge logs are dogged against steel arms and then moved against the high-speed saw to be cut to lumber thickness.

5. Lumber from the saws is transferred to the edgers where the boards are sawn to parallel edges, then to the trimmer where defects are removed and ends trimmed square.

6. The finger joining machine shown at the right makes possible the greater utilization of short pieces of lumber. The ends of the lumber are run through the machine and are then glued and joined together resulting in boards of any desired length.

7. New to the Bonner plant is the fabricating of laminated beams which are gaining wide acceptance in building construction because of their great strength-for-weight factor, beauty and the number of varied shapes and sizes in which they can be manufactured.

8. Many of the employees of the mill live in the town of Bonner, a community of well-kept houses and tree-shaded streets. Their opportunities for recreation are many and varied as the mill and town are located in the heart of one of the nation’s finest fishing, hunting and winter sports areas.

9. Over 500 employes at the Bonner mill, engaged in the harvesting of Montana’s fine timber, have maintained an average annual production of over 80 million board feet during the past 50 years. That is enough to build 8,000 homes per year. These forest products include high quality lumber, mine timbers, wood reels for wire and cable, laminate beams, wood chips for paper making and many other items made from wood. These fine products are shipped all over the United States.