Old Missoula

Logging Operations At Nine Mile Ended

A. C. M. Will Move Into Blackfoot Country Before Long

The logging camps at Nine Mile are being closed after 10 years of active operation.

Where the saws and axes of hundreds of husky lumberjacks have resounded for 10 years, silence now reigns. A small crew of men, less than 50 in all, are busy picking up steel along the logging road which led from Soudan[1] north into the woods of the Nine Mile country. Soon they will be done and then the work of the loggers will be completed.

Headquarters camp and the other camps along the route from Stark north toward the mountains in Martina have been dismantled. All equipment has been moved to the Blackfoot. All of the logs cut by the lumberjacks have been moved to the Bonner mill to be sawed into lumber. Where the hills have echoed the voices of between 400 and 500 men throughout the year as work was pushed, birds and wild animals of the forests will have the country as their own until farmers move in to develop the cut-over areas into agricultural lands.

It was in 1916 that the A. C. M. company first moved into the country around Stark and since that time, until this summer, this had been one of the largest logging operations in western Montana, a place where the experienced lumberjacks could always find a job waiting for him. But the day came when all of the 400,000,000 feet of timber in the chance had been cut and then a change of operations was necessary.

The A. C. M. is now preparing to go into the vast Ely[2] creek country in the Blackfoot valley, starting out east from the Greenough ranch, where huge stands of timber await the coming of the lumberman.

The article above appeared in The Daily Missoulian on July 10, 1926.

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