Oregon-American Lumber Company The Oregon-American Lumber
Company (1917-1934) and its successors—the Oregon-American
Lumber Corporation (1934-1953), the Long-Bell Lumber Company
(1953-1956), and the International Lumber Company
(1956-1957)—operated from the Nehalem Valley town of Vernonia.
The company logged approximately 2.5 billion board-feet of
timber from its 30,000-acre holdings in Columbia, Clatsop, and
Tillamook counties. O-A’s timber, considered one of the finest
old-growth stands of Douglas-fir timber known to modern man, was
notable for its uniformity of character and density. The
company’s timber was generally 300 to 600 years old. In the era
when an average stand of old-growth Douglas-fir held 55,000
board-feet to the acre and an excellent one contained up to
90,000 board-feet, the O-A tract had ten entire sections (a
section is 640 acres) that contained or exceeded 100,000 board-
feet per acre. In 1921, Vernonia was an isolated outpost of 150
inhabitants. By 1923 and before the mill sawed its firs