Falk: Company Lumber Town of the American West
Falk: Company Lumber Town of the American West
By Julie Clark. Foreword by Jon Humboldt Gates. Between the years 1884 and 1937, the company mill and lumber town of Falk thrived in what is now the Headwaters Forest Reserve. During a transitional time in logging history, Noah Falk was able to capitalize on the relatively inexpensive price of land, cheap labor, and inexpensive logging technologies, such as the band saw and the Dolbeer steam donkey. Between the 1940s and 1970s, Falk became a ghost town until the vacant buildings eventually became part of the soil that now supports the Headwaters Forest Reserve.
Julie Clark works for the Bureau of Land Management and is currently the Headwaters Forest Reserve ranger. She holds a master of arts in social sciences from Humboldt State University.
Clark's book is a good one for giving an historic overview of Falk: its origins, community and decline. As one of Arcadia's “Images of America” series, it has over 100 historic photographs with detailed and informative captions.
The book's first section highlights the technology developed for felling, milling and transporting lumber. The second explores life in a company town where workers come from around the nation and world to live in an isolated self-reliant community which provides its own general store, post office, dance hall, blacksmith and cook house, with schools and a church within a mile.
Section three deals with the transition to a ghost town when the automobile meant that workers could live elsewhere and the Depression undercut local prosperity. Eventually most buildings were razed due to liability, and Falk became a site in the Headwaters Forest Reserve with an interpretive center and trailside signs revealing the history of a once thriving community.