The Clark Gable Suite

In an article written for the Silverton Appeal in 1950, June Drake, Silverton photographer and historian, told about three mills that used Silver Creek to transport logs: John Liechty’s mill was located on a site now occupied by the Hi-School Pharmacy shopping Center, on the western edge of town.

Johnson and Ek operated their mill in the south end of Silverton, about ½ mile from downtown. G.B. Erwin ran his mill in the same vicinity as the very first mill in 1846, 2 -3 miles downstream; a pond had been created by backwater from a dam across the stream. Drake was 10 years old in February of 1890 when Silver Creek, due to heavy rains, and a warm Chinook wind melting the snow pack, overflowed it’s bank on the west side, almost reaching the Methodist Church.

Late one evening, a man came running down the street shouting “Save the bridge…..Johnson’s logs have broken loose!” The city fire bell was rung to call all available people. Some with pike poles and some with lanterns lifted high, men guided the logs away from the bridge in an effort to keep them from jamming. June never forgot that dramatic night, “the shouting of the men, the roar of the water and the booming of the logs”.

The first large commercial lumber mill was built in 1907. It was named the Silverton Lumber Co. Located in the northern end of town between Second and Mill St., it sat on about 20 acres. Railroad tracks had been built up into the foothills of the Cascades in order to bring the logs down to the mill. It had a capacity to cut 120,000 board feet in a 10 hour shift.

It closed in 1926, having sold their railroad system and logging camps to the next big company, Silver Falls Timber Co. This mill was built in 1916, four years after filing incorporation papers. Part of the back-up money came from Oregon and part of it from eastern U.S. investors. SFTC was located just to the east of Mill St. across from Silverton Lumber Co.

And so it happened, in 1922 just after Thanksgiving, a certain William C. ‘Billy’ Gable took a room at the Cottage Hotel in Silverton and got a job with the “Silver Falls Timber Co. as a lumber loader”. According to a check stub in the archives at Silverton’s museum, Wm. C. Gable was paid on Nov. 2, 1922 for $5.13 on a check from the Silverton Lumber Co. Gable was a budding actor in Portland at the time, where he met a young woman named Franz Doerfler from Silverton. Their affair was brief, with Gable heading off to San Francisco to pursue his acting career.

Returning to the story of the timber industry: ‘Mill Town’ sprung up on the north side of Silverton. Little houses were built to accommodate the mill workers. There was a hotel in the area, and some old-timers remembered a store, too.

There were 35 miles of railroad tracks up into the Abiqua and Silver Creek basins . The mill itself covered 143 acres and had a twelve acre mill pond. In 1917 it had a capacity to cut 225,000 board feet per ten hour period.

The company maintained several logging camps up in the Basin. Some were for single men and some were for families. There was a cook shack in the camps employing cooks and servers. There were a total of 18 camps built from 1907 to the mid-1930’s. As the old growth was logged off, the railroad and camps were moved further and further up into the Abiqua Basin on the western side of the Cascade Mountains.

Everyone and everything was transported by railroad (including a herd of transplanted elk in the 1920’s.) People rode in the ‘rag car’ if they needed to get back into town. It was the ‘caboose’ of the logging train, so called because of the cloth curtains that could be rolled down to offer a bit of protection from the dust and weather.

Logging was extremely hard work and dangerous. Few safety standards were in place, there were no tin hats to wear to protect from ‘widow-makers’, the name given to falling branches. Loggers would cut their pants legs off above the ankle, which helped to keep their pants from getting caught in little branches and the tangle of undergrowth. You could always tell a logger by his pants. Loggers were a tough bunch; packing their 2-man cross-cut saws called misery whips, axes, wedges and springboards.

A springboard was used to stand on if the butt of a tree was too big for the saw. The loggers had to get up high enough so that their saw could move back and forth. Before sawing, they had to determine where they wanted the tree to fall. Then they would chop a wedge out of that side and start sawing on the opposite side, stopping every once in a while to oil the saw. When they had sawn half-way through, they used wedges to finally tip the tree over, yelling “Timber” as a warning to anyone in the path of the falling tree.

By the late 1930’s the timber owned by the big mills had been logged. Silver Falls Timber Co. kept their mill running by bringing logs down out of the Detroit Canyon, but by the time WW II was over, the logging was pretty much done and the mill was closed. In the early 1950’s, before the mill could be dismantled, it caught fire and burned to the ground.

Back to Clark Gable’s tale: he and Franz met again when she was teaching dancing at a studio in San Francisco. He was there playing the part of Killer Mears in “The Last Mile”. Their romance never rekindled.

In 1937, Franz was called as a prosecution witness in the mail fraud trial of a Mrs. Violet Norton Wells. Mrs. Wells was convinced that Clark Gable was the man who fathered her child in England in 1922. Franz and M.C. Woodard, president of the Silver Falls Timber Co., were two of four Oregonians called to testify on Gables behalf. Woodard took payroll records and cancelled checks as evidence. Franz and Gable exchanged greetings during the court proceedings and recalled their meeting in Portland in 1922. Franz is quoted as saying that “Clark was a likeable chap” and that “we were very fond of each other at that time.”

In his heyday, Gable became the “The King of Hollywood.” Later, in 1999, the American Film Institute named Gable seventh among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time. Gable’s most famous role was Rhett Butler in the 1939 Civil War epic film Gone with the Wind, in which he starred with Vivien Leigh. His performance earned him his third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor; he had won the award for It Happened One Night (1934) and was also nominated for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Later memorable performances were in Run Silent, Run Deep, a classic submarine film; and his final film, The Misfits (1961) which paired Gable with Marilyn Monroe in one of her last roles.