By RHEA-FRANCES TETLEY
Historian
The 1853 Mormon Road up Twin Creek Canyon from San Bernardino was washed out by the 1862 Noachian Flood, and that route was abandoned after flooding out again in 1867. This led to Edward Daley constructing his toll road, which opened up the Lake Arrowhead area.
During those early lumbering years, only medium-sized cedar and sugar pine trees were cut, as all trees were hand-cut using two-man whipsaws to fell the trees. The trees were then hauled to the mill by oxen to be cut into lumber. Small trees didn’t yield enough lumber for the effort, and very large trees were too difficult to handle, so cutting was selective.
An 1870 steam powered sawmill
Construction of a wider and less steep lumber road, the Devil’s Canyon Toll Road, began in 1873 by Staples and Harbison along a route surveyed by county road surveyor Fred Perris. It went up Devil’s Canyon (named by Daniel Sexton in the 1840s) from behind where CSUSB is now located, over the ridge and dropped into Sawpit Canyon, (current-day Cedarpines Park), designed to reach the Seely Flats mills. It re-energized the western sawmills.
William LaPraix, a French Canadian (who wore a Van Dyke beard), had worked at the Boron Sawmill in Sawpit Canyon. He and Joseph B. Tyler became partners, building a new mill in June 1879 on Seely Flats. LaPraix and Tyler bought and moved 70,000 pounds of steam boilers and sawmill machinery to their new millsite, through Devil’s Canyon, hauling the equipment with oxen and horses, making many trips up the mountain. Lumbering was always dangerous work, as was moving the heavy mill equipment. On one leg of the move, one of the loaded wagons overturned, nearly killing the valuable team.
The steam-powered Tyler-LaPraix Cedar Flats Mill was built upstream from the washed-out Seely Mill in a grove of cedar trees. LaPraix enjoyed eating apples, planting the apple seed cores in the meadow next to his mills, resulting in many apple trees in the area today. (Orchard Bay in Lake Arrowhead was the meadow next to a LaPraix sawmill, for example.) They built flumes, boiler walls, opened a blacksmith shop and laid ties for rails for cart tracks into the woods. On July 26, the whistle blew and operations began. Families of the lumbermen moved up for the summer, using the wide Devil’s Canyon Road.
During the 1870s to 1880s, other sawmills in the Seely Flats area were the Salamander Mill and Van Slyke’s Mill (which became the Somer’s Clipper Mill) and on Shingle Mill Creek, Anton Scherman’s Shingle and Box Mill. All used the Devil’s Canyon Road to transport their lumber down the mountain.
The display of lumbering hand saws in the Mountain History Museum.
Despite the many mills in the small Seely Flat area (current day Valley of Enchantment), there is only one recorded account of strife among them – when David Seely swung a board at another logger in anger. The demand for lumber was such that all mills could operate at full capacity and sell everything they could produce and make money.
Beginning during the summers of the 1880s, vacationers began coming up to camp in the mountain meadows to escape the hot valley summers. The Seely Meadow, Huston Meadow, Dart Canyon and Devil’s Canyon areas became popular locations for these “summer tent cities,” using the 50-cent Devil’s Canyon Toll Road, which was used until 1908.
When the Arrowhead Reservoir Toll Road (toll $2) opened through Waterman Canyon in the mid-1890s, more vacationers arrived, most camping on the crest and Skyland areas.
In 1893 President Benjamin Harrison created the 737,280-acre San Bernardino National Forest Preserve, partially to protect the watershed from being destroyed by the logging. The privately owned timber tracts continued to be logged but, on forest land, lumbering became illegal.
0 Comments