The Hartwell Family

Elias Hartwell arrived in Northern California from Maine in 1856 and founded the Hartwell Timber Co. in 1857 with a modest crew of eight men to supply lumber. He became the town's defining timber baron: his estate became the ground for Oakridge College, and his will shaped the town for generations after his death. He was a man of appetite, force, and command — he built Briarmont, but he also bound it to the appetite of an industry that could not last.

Elias Hartwell's younger brother Abner followed him west and ran the company's yard on the San Francisco waterfront, where the schooners from Briarmont unloaded. The yard sold Hartwell redwood to builders in the city for decades, and Abner's son Wesley grew up on the wharf beside it.

Elias had one child, a daughter by Lucy Pruett, a Briarmont dressmaker he never married. Adelaide took her father's name after her mother died, and in 1911 his will made her its executor and left the estate to the town. Wesley contested the will in the county court, arguing that his uncle had not been of sound mind when he signed it. He lost in 1913 and went back to the Bay, where Abner's line has stayed. Adelaide spent the rest of her life in Briarmont.

Today the Hartwell name endures across Briarmont in the institutions it founded and the places it left behind.