In 1923, Susanville’s Lassen Lumber & Box Company hired a professional photograph to produce large leather bound photograph albums showcasing their entire operation. This was a common practice then. The purpose to attract investors.

Lassen Lumber was a much smaller operation as compared to its neighbors Fruit Growers and Red River. Due to its small size, Lassen Lumber only had three railroad locomotives, which are showcased in the above photograph.

Lassen Lumber’s railroad logging operations was short lived and ceased at the end of the 1929 logging season. The No 25, depicted above, was sold to Red River. In 1938, Red River sold it to Modesto & Empire Traction Company. What became of the other two locomotives, I do not know.

Tim

In 1918, the Lassen Lumber & Box Company built a sawmill and box factory at Susanville with an average annual production of 30 million  board feet of lumber. Unlike the Fruit Growers Supply Company and Red River Lumber Company, who owned their timber, Lassen Lumber’s  main source of timber came from two timber sales they had purchased from the Lassen National Forest.  In 1919, they started railroad logging on the northside of Peg Leg Mountain.  From 1919 to 1922, they operated three logging camps. In the fall of 1922, construction began on its largest logging camp—Camp Lasco. It opened in the spring of 1923, and became a seasonal home to 250 plus loggers and their families. The camp remained in operation through the logging season of 1930. In the winter of 1930, the Company leased the camp to the Western Pacific Railroad who was in the process of constructing the railroad’s Northern California Extension

The nation’s Great Depression took a toll on Lassen Lumber & Box. The company suspended its logging operations. They either purchased logs from its neighbors Fruit Growers or Red River, or in the majority of instances hired gypos, i.e., independent contract loggers.

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