| Hartwell Timber Co. |
Hartwell Timber Co. cut, milled and shipped redwood lumber from this coast for fifty-four years, and Briarmont grew up around it.
The camp
Elias Hartwell was born in Rockport, Maine, and grew up around sawmills. He came to California in 1856 for the timber and founded the company in 1857, before he was twenty. It began with eight men cutting redwood on the slopes above the coast and living in camp. Hartwell drove his crews hard, and he knew the work as well as any of them. By the early 1860s it had its own mill on the coastal bluffs.
The work
The company's crews felled the timber and its mill on the bluffs sawed it. The lumber went out by ship from the harbor below town, to a West building faster than it could find wood. Its timberlands spread through the lowland valleys around Briarmont and up the slopes behind them.
Storekeepers and tradesmen set up near the mill to get a share of the payroll, and their families came with them. By 1866 the camp was a town. The new Hartwell County made Briarmont its seat in 1872. For years most paychecks in the county came from the company or from someone who sold to its crews.
The steam donkey came into the woods in 1882. One winch could haul what had taken a whole ox team, so the company kept its crews and set them to cutting faster. The national panic of 1893 left the mill as quiet as every other one on this coast.
The cost
The crews cleared a stand and went on to the next. Behind them the slopes eroded, the creeks silted up and the salmon runs failed. By 1896 the hillsides above Briarmont had begun to slide, and the winter floods ran higher each year. That year Hartwell put the men on shorter hours and paid surveyors to map the old growth left on the upper ridges. There was a good deal less of it to count by then.
The end
In Hartwell's last years output fell and the business shrank, while the debts did not. When he died in 1911, his will had the mill, the works, the equipment and the timberlands sold to settle what the company owed. His daughter, Adelaide Hartwell, sold the works as his executor, and Everett Thayer, the company's superintendent and by then its largest creditor, bought the timberlands at the sale. The machinery went to buyers where buyers could be found and was taken apart where they could not, and the company ended with the sale.
What the town still has
No business took up the company's name after it closed. Its mill and harbor buildings are part of the town now, with cafés and galleries where the saws used to run. The Institute, founded on his old estate in 1918, had no tie to the company, though much of its early work was on the damage the company left.
Plenty of Briarmont families have a faller, a millhand, a cook or a bookkeeper from the company somewhere in their past. No full list of the people who worked for it has ever been put together.
People
- Elias Hartwell, founder
- Lyman Thayer, clerk, paymaster and treasurer
- Everett Thayer, superintendent
- Amos Tuttle, a hand from the camp years
- Bridget Nolan, the camp's cook