The Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. site in Benton County, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was one of the last commercially viable sawmills to operate under steam power until a decade ago, when it switched to electric power.Hull-Oakes Lumber Co.

A decade ago, the Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. still literally operated under its own steam.

The sawmill, some 10 miles west of Monroe in Benton County, was one of the last to operate under steam power and remain commercially viable.

Eventually, though, the 21st century proved inescapable. The company switched completely to electricity-based production in 2013, phasing in the electrical equipment over the course of a year or two. The old steam technology remained as a backup, but it’s been years since workers fired up the boiler for production, said Nathan Nystrom, the family-operated mill’s log buyer and forester.

For one thing, the 1906 steam engine was difficult to keep up.

“We had to work with a lot of machine shops and different folks to be able to do any repairs on it,” he said. “We did an analysis on what we would do if we had a major failure, and it would have been months and months of downtime to get that thing rebuilt.”

Using steam takes a lot of time, he said.

“The boilers are pretty intensive to get going,” he remembered. “We’d have a person come in at midnight every night to get the fires stoked and the pressure built up. When the shift started, we were able to get the steam engine running efficiently.”

Winter was more difficult. Millworkers used wood shavings and sawdust for fuel. “Sometimes it’s hard to get steam pressure built up, so you have to shut down for 10 minutes and build up pressure,” Nathan said. “So you get a little bit of downtime there.”

Fire risk presented another unavoidable reality.

“We were using a wood-fired boiler in a wood-framed sawmill, and there were some mill fires throughout the years, and there were a lot fewer underwriters writing insurance packages for mills,” Nystrom said.

Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. near Monroe, shown in a 2008 file photo, once ran entirely on steam power, its boiler fueled by burning sawdust.Jamie Francis/The Oregonian (file)

“They would come out here and see us burning shavings and sawdust and our boilers surrounded by a wood-frame building, it just made them very uncomfortable,” he said. “It was challenging obtaining insurance.”

The mill nonetheless remains a historical curiosity. A landmark recognized on the National Register of Historic Places, the sawmill was notable not only for its old-school methods, but also its role in bolstering the early Benton County economy.

Ralph Hull, the grandfather of company president Todd Nystrom and Nathan Nystrom’s great-grandfather, turned an existing mill site into the Ralph Hull Lumber Company in 1938.

“My granddad was more old school,” Todd Nystrom said. “The first 15 years I was here, it was really manual labor. I was out in the woods. I was in the mill. I was setting chokers, just doing everything.”

Hull acquired the property from his uncle Wes Miller, who had operated a mill on the site since World War I. Located on 28 acres on the east slope of the Coast Range at the end of Dawson Road off Oregon 99W, the property was once a Southern Pacific railhead known as Dawson Station.

Chester Oakes, an area logger and Hull’s brother-in-law, eventually became a partner in the mill. The company became the Hull-Oakes Lumber Company in 1955.

The mill has gained such a reputation over the past 84 years that business is largely word of mouth, Todd Nystrom said. The company specializes in nonstandard cuts — larger or longer than is typically widely available.

Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. specializes in nonstandard lumber cuts. Its customers usually find the mill through word of mouth.Hull-Oakes Lumber Co.

“We’ve been in business so long that people know if they want large and long timbers, they can at least come ask us,” he added. “Whether we can do it or not is another question. We don’t advertise on TV, newspapers or stuff like that because a lot of our contracts are nationwide or worldwide.”

The company’s high-profile projects include providing wood for the restoration of the U.S.S. Constitution, the 1797 frigate in Boston Harbor that is now the world’s oldest ship still afloat.

Such projects represent the fun of operating a sawmill, Nathan Nystrom said.

“We’re not just making 2-by-4s for housing construction,” he said. “There are times when I might be meeting with different landowners, and we’re selecting particular trees for certain projects.”

Nathan said he loves “seeing that process of cutting the tree down, getting it out to the landing, putting it on the truck and following it through the mill.” And he rather misses the old steam technology.

“It’s nice to be interesting and keep some of that old technology alive, but on the other hand, if we want to be perpetual, we have to be competitive,” he said. “We have to be as efficient as we can and as productive as we can.”

Todd Nystrom said even historical businesses have to adapt unless they want to be history themselves. “People aren’t going to buy lumber from us just because we’re old and kind of cool,” he said.

Hull-Oakes Lumber Co. specializes in timber up to 85 feet long.Hull-Oakes Lumber Co.

The company of 2022 has approximately 50 employees and produces between 15 to 20 million board feet per year. At least 20% of its logs come from its own timber lands.

And the mill remains something of an attraction. It offers tours by appointment.

People visiting the mill pass through Bellfountain, the unincorporated community of some 75 people where many generations and branches of the Nystrom family were born and raised.

The community now mainly consists of the church and Bellfountain County Park, both more than 100 years old. The only remnant of business beyond the sawmill, Country Boy Gas, stands abandoned with decaying gas pumps and a “Gone Fishin’” sign on what’s left of its building.

Today, Hull-Oakes Lumber Company’s 50 employees almost outnumber Bellfountain residents, and the sawmill (two miles west of Bellfountain) remains the dominant business in southeast Benton County. Bruce Kupfer, the pastor of the nondenominational Bellfountain Community Church, said townsfolk are grateful.

“The mill has been a big employer,” Kupfer said. “The owners of the mill have been very generous to the community. There’s a high level of respect for the people who own the mill and their role in the community.”

The Hull-Oakes Lumber Company, located at 23837 Dawson Road approximately 10 miles west of Monroe off Oregon 99W, offers tours by appointment. Call 541-424-3112.

-- Tom Henderson | For The Oregonian/OregonLive

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