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Libby residents fear impacts of loss of large employer
When the steam plumes no longer rise above the Stimson plywood mill, will the town the keep breathing, or will it become a ghostly remnant of its hard-working past?
By Jim Mann
The Daily Inter Lake
It’s hard to understate the impact of losing the area’s largest private employer, 300 jobs and a $14 million annual payroll. But the loss of the last major wood products plant in southern Lincoln County is also profound in terms of heritage.
Libby is a town with saw shops and machinery-supply stores, a place where a logger can buy cork boots on Main Street. The high school sports teams are called the Libby Loggers and "Logger Days" is a traditional summer festival.
When John K. McBride arrived in Libby, there were wooden sidewalks and the forests around town were booming with logging activity.
It was 1949, and McBride watched Libby boom for the next 30 years.
The J. Neils Lumber Co., established by Minnesota businessman Julius Neils around 1919, was the undisputed center of economic activity. The company owned 200,000 acres of forest land and operated a large sawmill.
McBride started working for the company in 1952, when the Kootenai National Forest was waging war on a massive spruce beetle infestation.
"It was frantic. There were all kinds of logging outfits going up," McBride recalls. "The Forest Service worked differently back then. In fact, the Forest Service was pressed for manpower."
When J. Neils merged with the New York-based St. Regis Paper Co. in 1956, McBride recalls that employment at the Libby operation was 1,200 to 1,300 people.
"A lot of things were done by hand that are now done by machinery," he said. "Libby at that time was a boom town. Jobs were easy to get in the woods and the mill. We were going full blast."
To this day, McBride says he can find standing wooden telephone poles in eastern Montana that were cut and treated at the Libby plant.
"We produced millions of those dang things," he said. "At the same time, we were building a problem."
Creosote and other residues from chemicals used to treat the poles were flushed into a holding pond. Gradually the toxins seeped into the town’s groundwater, creating Libby’s first environmental timebomb.
On the other side of town, a Zonolite asbestos mine that was developed in 1919 had become part of the W.R. Grace & Co. Now widely regarded in infamy, the mine operated until 1990, when roughly 150 jobs were lost.
In the decade that followed, the widespread and harmful effects of asbestos contamination came to light. Hundreds of asbestos-related illnesses and deaths, spiraling medical needs and a federal Superfund designation and a crippling stigma have been with the town ever since.
But it was just part of the problems that have evolved in southern Lincoln County over the last decade.
Logging continued strong into the 1970s, a time when the mill operated under the St. Regis banner, and construction of the Libby Dam was carried out that same decade. But jobs associated with that project left as fast as they arrived.
Champion International bought the mill and its timberlands in 1980, and logging carried on unimpeded. It eventually took a toll on the company’s private lands, McBride said.
"The big old trees on private land are 98 percent gone," McBride said.
Meanwhile, logging started to tighten up on the far more expansive Kootenai National Forest.
In 1993 and 1994, the ASARCO mill in Troy closed, and Champion sold its lands to Plum Creek Timber Co. and its Libby wood processing facilities to Stimson. The net effect was 600 lost jobs.
Good economic news has been scarce in Libby ever since.
McBride fears the supporting cast behind a timber industry — the truck drivers, the machinists, the welders — is in danger of evaporating.
"The very long term view says that this is the most productive forest land in Montana, and it’s one of the most productive areas in the inland northwest," McBride says. "The short-term view is very, very poor. We are losing the machinery to turn this into a product that people want."
He’s concerned that Libby is poised to become a town of unemployed and retired people, and that turning the town around will involve starting from scratch, just like Julius Neils did more than 80 years ago.
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