Post mill burn kindles memory of bygone era
<p>Somers volunteer firefighters burned cull fence material, bark and sawdust — all that remained after 34 years of Periman Cedar custom-made posts and rails — March 10.</p>
<p class="p1">Lawrence Periman owned and operated Periman Cedar Post Mill for 34 years. He bought cull cedar from loggers’ timber sales. The cedar didn’t measure up to sawmill grade but worked well for split rails and posts.</p>
Editor’s note: Margorie Periman wrote this as a tribute to her husband Lawrence’s years of hard work at their fence mill on the day the Somers Volunteer Fire Department burned what remained of it. When she read it to him, Lawrence said it reminded him of so many others who, like him, worked alone in their saw or post mills, enjoying their independence. In the old days, they were buying just enough logs to keep on going — “and they all did for a while,” Periman says.
“I also remembered peeling bark off those posts with an ax and stacking them in bundles for Lawrence just to help out. Then I would go home and help the kids with their homework and make dinner. Ah ... those were the days!”
A blaze rose high in the air on a Cedar Mill Road property March 10, as firefighters with the Somers Volunteer Fire Department burned cull fence material, bark and sawdust — all that remained after 34 years of Periman Cedar custom-made posts and rails.
Owner and operator Lawrence Periman had started the business after he arrived in the Flathead Valley in 1969. He bought cull cedar from loggers’ timber sales. The cedar didn’t measure up to sawmill grade but worked well for split rails and posts.
His market was good. A fence products company in Toledo, Ohio, bought everything he made.
Marleau Hercules bought it by the boxcar or flatcar load — 3,000 hand-split pieces per load — and shipped it by rail. That’s a lot of fence.
In recent years, semi-trucks carried loads to Ohio where the cedar fencing beautified suburban houses, neighborhood parks and even a zoo. People loved Western red cedar, and often sent Lawrence snapshots of the installed fences.
The 1970s and ’80s brought changes to the wood products industry in the Flathead Valley. Lawrence still could buy cull cedar, but local loggers found timber sales harder to win and haulers had to travel farther to find good loads.
Often, the quality of the timber failed to pay the cost of the logs and hauling. Waste materials piled up with as much as a third of a load relegated to the burn pile.
Logging jobs began to disappear as green signs with the words, “This family or business supported by timber dollars,” appeared in windows of houses and businesses.
Despite the changing times, Lawrence kept on working, making cedar fences. He never looked for another job, and he never collected unemployment.
Years passed, but the cedar mill never changed. Summer or winter, Lawrence stood at day’s end banding up his 100-piece bundles, keeping a careful eye on the calendar date and payday.
Our daughter and son each had a turn at working at the mill. Through the years, I continued to bring Lawrence a cup of tea in the afternoon and sometimes stayed to shovel sawdust to help clean up.
In November 2003, Lawrence was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It hit hard during the last year he worked and, one day, he walked away from the mill yard, unable to finish a load.
The Toledo fence company, longtime partners and friends, sent one of their employees to finish up and ship out the load. The mill yard remained a clutter of machinery and wood waste, with a couple of loads of good logs and a pile of log ends nobody would take for firewood.
Eventually, the logs and machinery sold, but the Periman Cedar mill yard seemed frozen in bark, sawdust and the memory of Lawrence’s last count of bundles that was not quite a truckload.
But on March 10, time marched on when three trucks and a crew of Somers volunteer firefighters burned the leavings of one man’s final load and an era of one-man mill operations.