Four Million Feet of Logs: The Boom Comes to the Pend d'Oreille
A logging company began driving pilings for a 4-million-foot log boom and a new sawmill on the Pend d'Oreille riverfront.
The Newport brought the Fidelity's pile driver up from Cusick on Saturday and took it to the falls. A gang of men started work on Monday constructing the new booms of the company across the river from the city.
The new booms will begin at Albeni Falls and end at the Motor place, opposite the docks of the Pend d'Oreille River Navigation Co. It is understood that the new sawmill of the company will be located on the land recently purchased of Rev. Motor. The booms will have a capacity for over 4,000,000 feet of logs, sufficient for a year's run for a large mill. The piling will be driven in some places over 200 feet from the present low water mark in the river. The construction of the booms will require over 2,000 pieces of piling. The material is partly on the ground and the balance is in Priest River and will be driven here as soon as possible.
The company has a river frontage of more than one and one-half miles along the river from Albeni Falls to the ferry line opposite old town. Engineer James Fleming has been at work for some time securing soundings and making plats of the property of the company.
“The booms will have a capacity for over 4,000,000 feet of logs, sufficient for a year's run for a large mill.”
Log booms once choked this stretch of the Pend d'Oreille, and the fight over timber and water rights shaped the riverfront. As the mills disappeared, Newport had to reinvent its relationship to the river — a familiar story for resource towns across the Northwest.
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