The North Fork Lumber Company Mill Crew

 

The archives preserve the names of several key individuals who lived and labored in the Deer Creek network during the logging boom:

1. The North Fork Lumber Company Mill Crew

A group portrait of the mill crew operating the windowless boiler house and lumber yards along Deer Creek identifies these local workers:

• Tom Vandevender
• Austin Nottingham
• Frank Moore
• Porter Phillips
• Marlie Vandevender
• Red Ryder
• Jim Snyder
• Charlie Arbogast

2. The Train and Maintenance Crews

Operating geared locomotives on steep, temporary mountain tracks required specialized crewmen. The archive identifies the primary crew standing alongside the North Fork Lumber Company's famous geared Shay No. 7 locomotive:

• Clarence Phillips
• Gray Ryder

3. Bunkhouse and Camp Life at Camp #1

Deep-woods logging camps were not just industrial zones, but close-knit domestic spaces for pioneering families and supervisors:

• Sadie and Charlie Myers: Photographed standing proudly with their heavy team of draft horses directly in front of the narrow, vertical-plank bunkhouses of Camp #1. Sadie’s presence in her gingham dress represents the wives and families who made a home in these isolated railroad camps.
• Carl Rushing (originally indexed as Roshing): The dedicated woods foreman at Camp #1 who managed the dangerous daily logistics of cutting and skidding giant spruce logs.

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The WPA Connection: How These Lumber Towns Were Born

Your currently selected source, WPA 1_Part1.pdf, provides the broader historical and geopolitical backdrop that explains why these timber empires existed in Pocahontas County:

• The Disputed Boundary Line (1882): The WPA records explain that the very establishment of lumber towns like Burner, May, Gertrude, and Wildell along the West Fork of the Greenbrier River was made possible by an 1882 county boundary dispute settlement. A deciding vote by a state umpire ceding a heavily contested strip of land from Randolph County to the Greenbank District of Pocahontas County added "valuation of many thousand acres of valuable timber" to the county, paving the way for the great band saw mills to operate there from 1900 to 1920.
• Expanding the Harvest (1926): The WPA surveyors also tracked the continued operations of the North Fork Lumber Company as they pushed beyond their original Deer Creek boundaries. The records document that the North Fork Lumber Company, in partnership with the Raywood Lumber Company, moved on to harvest the virgin forests of Galfords Creek in 1926, stripping the famous hemlock trees that had historically kept the creek's waters shaded and cool.

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