In August 2013, I conducted a Westwood Cemetery Tour. Since Westwood began as a company town of the Red River Lumber everyone worked together in a common goal.

With that in mind,  in every operation, everyone plays an important role, as one cannot exist without the other. But before you can build a mill, you first need timber. That is where Charles Gardner, along with brother Irvine, better known as “Ippy.” The Gardner brothers, along with E.G. Scammon were part of the early California timber cruisers working under T.B. and Clinton Walker to not only examine timberlands, but also had the tedious jobs of going to a variety of county courthouses to examine land titles, so see who owned what parcel, values, taxes, etc. In a relatively short time frame of just over a decade Red River owned nearly 800,000 acres timberland in California making it the third largest landowner in California, only behind the railroads, who received their land for free from the government. Even after the Red River assembled its timberland, there was still plenty of work for the timber cruisers to do. Chief among them, was to plot out every year which sections of land that would be logged. As it was in the past, timber is still part of Red River’s heritage, now operating under Red River Forests, which is managed by Beaty & Associates.

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